recession

Uh-oh: The dreaded double-dip recession may have already started

by Lee on July 5, 2011 2:00 am · Comments/Link

We have to laugh when we read about the double dip recession. From our point of view, it’s like worrying about the chicken in the oven when your house is on fire.

The collapse in manufacturing and regional Fed indices over the last two months has been stunning, but generally unreported. The last time we saw an economic contraction of this scale was in February of 2008, two months into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

As ZeroHedge said, “We are confident that once the groupthink wraps its head around the fact that the auto production based renaissance is not coming, and the economy officially tumbles into the commode of Ben Bernanke’s fiat dungeon, the NBER will determine (with an appropriate 12-18 month delay), that the current recession started in April of 2011.”

As EconomicCollapse.net said, “The chicken is turning a delightful golden brown. Would you firemen like to join us for dinner?”

mfg-survey

Source: Zero Hedge

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Prominent economist says there’s a “99% chance of another recession by 2012”

by Lee on June 21, 2011 13:33 pm · 1 comment

David Rosenberg bears the lofty title of Chief Economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates.

It’s not difficult to figure out that those of us at EconomicCollapse.net put very little faith in the words of most economists. They’re like members of a barbershop quartet – one may be a baritone, another may be a tenor and a third may sing bass, but they all sing the same song.

The economists who catch our attention are the ones who aren’t afraid to go against the mainstream – the ones who speak truth to power and take positions that aren’t endorsed by the criminals in Washington, DC.

David Rosenberg, for example, expressed his heresy in an interview with Mike Shedlock at Bloomberg.com. We’re guessing that he won’t be invited to dinner with Timothy Geithner anytime soon.

[click to continue…]

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Chart of the day: The deepest “recession” and slowest jobs recovery since the Depression

by Lee on June 6, 2011 13:48 pm · Comments/Link

We saw a poll the other day that said an increasing number of Americans think the economy will never recover. Not that it will take longer to recover than they expected. Never.

Of course, you can put a check mark next to our names on that list. Sure, there may be a tick upward and maybe even what appears to be a recovery, but we see nothing but a long term debt bomb that’s strapped to the chests of the suicide bombers in Congress and the Fed.

Check out this chart from Clusterchart. It compares percentages of job lost and recovered this recession versus every other post-World War II recession.

It’s ugly. Really ugly. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get pretty any time soon.

chart-job-losses

Source: Business Insider

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Treasury Secretary predicts double dip recession unless his ultra successful policies are continued

by Lee on May 17, 2011 1:00 am · 1 comment

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warns of dire consequences if Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit. He says it will trigger a double dip recession.

This, of course, raises the zen-like question, how can we have a double dip recession when we’ve never really come out of the first one? Sure, we realize that economists say the first dip ended several quarters ago, but that’s like saying a baseball game ended in the third inning.

The National Journal is the medium that delivers Geithner’s message:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said if Congress fails to lift the debt ceiling and the U.S. defaults on its obligations “this abrupt contraction would likely push us into a double dip recession,” painting the most explicitly dire prediction to date of the consequences of inaction.

In a heavily-anticipated response to Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who asked Geithner to document the economic and fiscal impacts of failing to lift the statutory debt limit, the Treasury secretary detailed a chain reaction that would cripple the economy, costing jobs and income.

A default would inflict catastrophic far-reaching damage on our nation’s economy, significantly reducing growth and increasing unemployment,” said Geithner in the letter to Bennet which was dated May 13. “Even a short-term default could cause irrevocable damage to the economy.”

The bottom line here is clear to anyone who’s paying any attention:

Things are going to get worse before they get better. The Obama administration knows it and is frantically casting around for someone else to take the blame.

Source: National Journal

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Let’s Put Yesterday’s Job Number In Persepctive

by Mark on April 2, 2011 12:56 pm · 1 comment

Yesterday’s Labor Department nonfarm payrolls number showed jobs increased by 216,000 in March. Not a great number, but a hell of a lot better than we’ve been getting. But just in case you might have gotten all excited when you saw that number in today’s paper, along with the 8.8% unemployment number, you might want to put it all into perspective first, and take a look at the big picture, as charted by Chart of the Day.

jobs march 11

Today’s chart puts the latest data into perspective by comparing nonfarm payrolls following the the end of the latest economic recession (i.e. the Great Recession — solid red line) to that of the prior recession (i.e. 2001 recession — dashed gold line) to that of the average post-recession from 1954-2000 (dashed blue line). As today’s chart illustrates, the current jobs recovery is much weaker than the average jobs recovery that follows the end of a recession. Today’s chart also illustrates that the current jobs recovery is slightly stronger than what occurred following the recession of 2001 and that the trend is up.

This last recession was much deeper and the recovery is much more shallow than the average recession.

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Best Graph of Recession Job Loss Comparisons Yet – And it Ain’t Pretty

by Mark on December 30, 2010 10:06 am · 1 comment

Just how bad are the job losses in this Great Recession? Let’s put it this way: compare the losses against the previous recessions we’ve had since World War II, and you’ll come away wondering why our current recession (oops, sorry, I forgot the recession is over) is even called just a recession.

employment recession job losses

Chart Source: CalculatedRiskBlog

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Nouriel Roubini: It’s Going to Get Worse

by Mark on December 7, 2010 7:05 am · Comments/Link

If you’re feeling good about the (expected) announcement of the renewal of the Bush tax cuts, wipe that silly optimism off your face and listen to Nouriel Roubini about the real state of the financial crisis — no, it’s didn’t go away — and how close we are to a new, and deep, recession.

Most think we’ve already seen the financial crisis and the resulting recession. But, Roubini says we’ve yet to see one of the worst recessions in decades and (still) the worst U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression. At fault are the central bank, the fed, the treasury, who are all making major mistakes.

Things are going to get worse, he says, where Fannie and Freddie are insolvent, where hundreds of small banks are insolvent, where some regional banks go bankrupt and where even some of the national major banks are insolvent. And in a year or two there will not be any major independent broker-dealers left.

This is a major systemic financial crisis and there is no end to it. There is nothing that can be done at this point to save us.

Go to cash, he says. Period.

Have a good day.

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The Great Recession’s Horrific Job Losses Charted Against Past Recessions

by Mark on December 4, 2010 13:36 pm · 1 comment

Just how bad is the Great Recession, in terms of job losses. With unemployment now at 9.8% and with the disappointingly dismal numbers we received in yesterday’s jobs report, you already know it’s very, very bad. But this chart really puts it in perspective by comparing our current recession (perhaps more appropriately, near-depression) with all the recessions since World War II. We think you’ll agree, it’s not a pretty picture.

It shows job losses in percentage terms, from the start of the employment recession. The dotted line on the current recession shows payroll employment excluding temporary Census workers.

Employment Recessions since WWII

(Click to enlarge)

Thank God our president and congress have been focusing these last two years on all the things that really matter in terms of producing jobs: the destruction of health care, cap-and-trade, increasing regulations, fighting non-existent global warming climate change, paying back unions through the so-called stimulus package, threatening talk radio, postponing 2011 tax policy discussions, and fine-tuning his skills on the celebrity talk show circuit. Yes, he’s been a real help. And now the lame duck congress is doing their part but putting first things first: gays in the military, deluding ourselves that Russia will disarm along with us, and Mrs. Obama’s control of your child’s diet.

No wonder were doing so well. But as those defending all the actions of this administration say, hell, it would have been worse without all these actions. Uh huh.

Chart Source: CalculatedRiskBlog.com

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