Some bleak predictions from an economist that was right about the last economic downturn... Forget everything you know about economics and read Jack Rasmus! 1. The U.S. will enter a double dip recession around late 2013 or 2014, providing both of the following occur: that either U.S. policymakers continue deficit cutting and a more severe banking crisis erupts in Europe. Either event may be sufficient to precipitate recession. Both most certainly will. 2. The Fed will begin reducing its $85 billion a month liquidity injection significantly within the next 12 months. Monetary retraction will severely disrupt both stock and bond markets. A major stock market correction will ensue and may have already begun at this writing. The additional financial markets at greatest risk are corporate junk bonds, real estate investment trusts, and money market funds. 3. There will be yet another round of deficit cutting later in 2013 and it will be associated with a major revision of the U.S. tax code. That tax code change will include a big reduction in corporate tax rates, from the current 35 percent to somewhere around 28 percent, perhaps phased in over time. Multinational corporations will also get a sweet deal on their $1.9 trillion offshore cash hoard, paying less in the end than their legally required 35 percent rate. R&D tax credits and other depreciation acceleration tax cuts will also occur as part of the deal. 4. In the next round of deficit cutting, Social security and Medicare spending will be cut a minimum of $700 billion—already proposed in Obama’s 2014 budget—and perhaps much more. 5. The much-touted current housing recovery will stall and single home price increases will slow and perhaps even level off. (More than 1.1 million new foreclosures were added to the roughly 14 million total to date in 2013.) Housing will bounce along the bottom much like other sectors of the economy. Institutional speculators will continue to drive the market and once again convert it into a speculators dream, different in form from the subprime fiasco but similar in content. 6. Manufacturing and U.S. exports will slow still further, drifting in and out of negative growth as the global economy and world trade continues to contract further. 7. There will be still be no sustained recovery of jobs over the coming year (today’s official jobless is 21 million). High wage jobs will be replaced with low wage, full-time with part-time/temp, current workers with jobs leaving the labor force, and new lower paid entrants taking their jobs. 8. The current negotiations between the Obama administration and Pacific Rim countries to create a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)—NAFTA on steroids—will be concluded, but will not pass Senate approval until after 2014, or take effect until 2017. 9. With regard to the global economy, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis will again worsen and the banking system grow more unstable. Austerity policy will focus more on direct attack on wages and benefits. 10. More economies in the Eurozone will slip into recession, including Denmark and perhaps Sweden. France’s recession will deepen. Germany will block the formation of a bona fide central bank in the Eurozone and the UK will vote to leave the European Union. 11. China growth rate will continue to drift lower and it will be forced to devalue its currency, the Yuan, as Japan and other currencies are driven lower at its expense by QE policies. A global currency war, now underway, will intensify. 12. Gobal trade will continue to decline. 13. Japan’s risky experiment with massive QE and modest fiscal stimulus will prove disastrous to the global economy, resulting in still more speculative excess and financial instability. Japan’s stock and asset markets will benefit in the short run, but not the rest of the economy in the longer run. 14. Capitalist economies worldwide will converge around QE monetary policies, more modest deficit spending cuts, and a more focused attack directly on workers wages and especially social benefits like pensions, healthcare services and the like—i.e. the U.S. formula. The consequence will be more income inequality worldwide and no noticeable positive impact on economic growth. The next financial crisis event may not come in the form of a crash of a particular market, but in the form of a grinding slow stagnation of markets in general. With general stagnation of the real economy, a slow drift into no growth scenarios is a distinct possibility.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:13:44 +0000
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