Contrary to popular sentiment, we have not been in a recession until now. Since 2007, what people thought was a recession, has actually been a long, slow, government subsidized protracted crash. Instead of letting the markets crash themselves a year ago and begin to level off, government meddling has exhausted resources propping up the collapse. The results were recession-like attributes; loss of jobs, less money, contracting GDP. Up until now however, the GDP has still been slightly positive, and unemployment has been under 7%.
That is at an end. The recession is here now with a vengeance. However, due to all of the government intervention, the problem is actually now much worse. If we had the crash a year ago, as the markets wanted, those suddenly out of work would have had more money and resources to pull through a recession and even reinvest when the market bottomed. Since the government has been dragging out the crash, we’ve been investing resources over a year into a decline. Now that the recession has actually begun, due to the long strain on all of us, we don’t have the resources, energy, or trust in the system to begin coming out of it for some long time. Some economists are estimating 10-30 years using our own history as a guideline. Also, since we’re going into a recession already constrained, that greatly opens the possibility of a depression.
Look at history, look at economics. Recessions and depressions come AFTER the crash. This has been nothing more than a protracted crash complete with Friday’s "dead cat bounce" (Google it), and the worst is yet to come. If this were a recession it would be good news, because we’d at least know we were on a slow road to the very bottom where the only way to go was back up. But we’ve only just seen the collapse of the mortgage bubble. Next is the collapse of the credit card bubble which will probably take down most consumer goods with it.
Most consumer outlets that offer their own credit cards (which are most consumer outlets these days) will collapse when the loans are defaulted due to the strain on each of us from a government subsidized crash and a new recession. Look at GM. They fell so badly last week not because of their manufacturing arm, but because of GMAC, their financing institution. Sears makes more of their money from their finance department than from selling merchandise, same for Macy’s, Home Depot, many large supermarkets, and just about everything else. The credit card bubble will be much worse, because when people are unemployed, foreclosed, and evicted, they will need emergency funds. Most people use their maxed out credit cards for living expenses as well as their emergency fund.
Stores providing credit may be shuttered. Banks only slightly touched by the mortgage crisis will suddenly collapse under the credit card crisis. The effects will be compounded by the fact that we’ll be kicked when we’re down. After that we may even see the collapse of the student loan bubble, the collapse of lending in general, and the collapse of the dollar bubble, which would bring us back to 1970’s economic levels (if we’re lucky, the 30’s if we’re unlucky), before Nixon decoupled our dollar from the gold standard, the Dow was at less than a thousand, and before easy credit was aggressively marketed.
I say the 1970’s because if you look at the DOW chart over time, the majority of growth before the 1980’s was on a moderate incline. As the nation switched from a creditor nation to a debtor nation throughout the 1980’s, coupled with aggressive marketing of consumer debt by banks now freed from interest rate regulations usury laws after 1978, the Dow begins growing at a much steeper rate. When the HELOC, subprime mortgage, and derivatives market opened in the 90’s and gained steam in this decade, the line gets even steeper until it just couldn’t hold anymore last year and began a long bear market run that wiped out billions until the Panic this October.
By the end of Friday’s session, we were back at 1998 levels. Do you think it can go as far down as I’ve suggested here? What can a nation 10 trillion dollars in debt do to stem the collapse? When they say they will inject capital into the banks, aren’t they just printing money in an attempt to inflate the debt away? How long can this broken system of leveraging a future and living beyond your means possibly hold up?
For another of my questions on this topic, please link here:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ArwYK6mBrtGb2KVMvXUElyXsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20081011092417AA3hraD
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