patrick.net

Robert, you know darn well those were just weeds.

Recession is yuppie-scum newsmedia talk anyway.
Used to be, the down periods were called depressions, till the Great Depression which was just the first Really Bad Depression after the News Media Elite became one of the Estates in our society. Since the other depressions did not happen on their watch, the Great Depression was the First Depression and it was so awful no one wants to evoke memories of it, kind of like some other words that we don't use because of the baggage they bring.

AFAIK even committed Keynsians like Krugman don't understand (or at least don't refer to) the underlying mechanics of the erstwhile Bush Economy.

AFAICT, the Bush Boom was simply the result of household indebtedness going from $8T in 2001 to $14.4T in 2007. This $6.4T in debt was the equivalent of sending a $1000 debit card to every household in the US EVERY MONTH for the 5+ years of the boom. Nice stimulus if you can get it.

Taken altogether with corporate debt, there is perhaps still $4T or so of zombie debt in the system!

This is 10X the size of the S&L crisis and 2X or so the size of Japan's Bubble Economy spoilage of the 80s.

People who think the economy is going to get back up, dust itself off, and get back to work simply don't understand what happens during a balance sheet recession: deflationary chain reaction of demand disappearance / cross-default.

Every dollar borrowed in the past 10 years has the potentially of becoming a bad debt. The PtB really need to turn the machines back on, but how is the question.

Dollar's not going anywhere in the FX sense. A devalued dollar is good for us -- it will help our secondary and tertiary economic sectors and make it easier to pay down foreign-held debt.

Banks don't care about inflation -- they prefer it to the alternative of getting nothing via deflationary collapse.

America is only two years away from not having a banking sector any more.

Between when I was born and when I got my driver's license, gasoline went from 40c to $1.25, right in line with general inflation.

Another dose of such inflation isn't going to be TEOTWAWKI.