Business

Summer closed in a whirlwind of weather chaos for the United States and its territories. At the start of the summer, two obvious signs that the US economy was flying apart emerged -- the big blowouts in the auto industry and in retail . I found it helpful to take a review of what summer brought:

Carmageddon crashes on

The auto industry began a decline similar to the one we experienced at the start of the Great Recession. (See “Carmageddon Crashes into ‘the Recovery’ Right on Schedule.”)

Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

US Treasury Yield v. Euro “Junk Bond” Yield. A new record in central-bank engineered absurdity. 

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

The Grim Reaper has taken his scythe to the Venezuelan bolivar. The death of the bolivar is depicted in the following chart. A bolivar is worthless, and with its collapse, Venezuela is witnessing the world’s worst inflation. 

As regular readers may recall, one of the alleged reasons for the market swoon at the end of 2015 and early 2016 was what Deutsche Bank first dubbed "quantitative tightening" but not by central banks (that would come later), but by sovereign wealth funds in general - with an emphasis on petrodollar nations who were struggling to balance their budgets at a time of plunging oil prices and were forced to sell assets - and China in particular, which faced with a tumbling Yuan was forced to sell billions in US-denominated securities to halt the sharp devaluation of the Yuan.

Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist,

It’s easy for me to sit back and take pot shots at the hedge fund gurus calling for a repeat of the 2008 crash. Spouting words about markets never repeating the previous crisis is kind of cheap. If I am so sure history won’t repeat, why don’t I offer an alternative theory?

Well, at the risk of embarrassing myself, here it goes.