Jerome Powell says absolutely not. But Jerome Powell also once said balance sheet reduction was on autopilot and that the Federal Reserve wasn’t going to cut interest rates. What the Fed chair says today doesn’t necessarily line up with what the Fed chair does tomorrow. Read More.

The last recession was really, really bad, but it was never like this. It is time for us to face reality, and that means admitting that the U.S. economy has plunged into a depression. This is already the worst economic downturn that America has experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and we are right in the middle of the largest spike in unemployment in all of U.S. history by a very wide margin. Read More.

Fewer Americans are calling their mortgage servicers to ask for relief from mortgage payments, but the housing industry isn’t out of the woods yet. More than 4.1 million homeowners are in forbearance plans now, according to the latest data from the Mortgage Bankers Association. Read More.

Last week, House Democrats unveiled their latest pandemic-relief package. The bill combines aid for families, a bailout for struggling cities and states, and additional funds for testing, tracing, and hospitals. The price tag is about $3 trillion—and it comes just weeks after the president signed an economic-relief package worth about $2 trillion. Read More.

With the BLS’s JOLTs, or job openings and labor turnover, survey coming in with an extra month delay, we already knew that the March data would be dismal (especially considering the total implosion in April when over 20 million people lost their jobs), and sure enough that’s what happened when the BLS reported that in March the number of job openings plunged from an upward revised 7.004 million to just 6.191 million, the 813K monthly drop the largest on record going back to 2000. Read More.

U.S. factory production plummeted in April by the most in records back to 1919 as coronavirus-related shutdowns exacted a bigger toll on the economy. Read More.

U.S. retail sales tumbled by a record 16.4% from March to April as business shutdowns caused by the coronavirus kept shoppers away, threatened the viability of stores across the country and further weighed down a sinking economy. Read More.

The German economy fell into recession after recording the sharpest quarterly contraction since the 2009 financial crisis as coronavirus-related shutdowns decimated the end of the first quarter, data showed on Friday.Read More.

Just moments after equities closed near the highs on Friday after yet another retail-driven rush into the stock market, the Federal Reserve poured cold water over all the bulls when the central bank unexpectedly issued a stark warning that stock and other asset prices could suffer “significant declines” should the coronavirus pandemic deepen – which we hope is not a shock to anyone – while highlighting that commercial real estate, which as we showed just yesterday just won’t stop collapsing, will be the hardest-hit industries. Read More.

Speaking in a video conference organized by the Peterson Institute, turbo money printer Jerome Powell today reassured the market that negative rates are not something the Fed – which expanded its balance sheet by $2.6 trillion in the past two months – is contemplating now. Read More.

US stocks zigged and zagged all day to a widely divergent close. The DJIA dropped 218 points (0.9%) but the NASDAQ outperformed once again, gaining 45 points (0.5%).

Stay tuned as the battle 0of the SkyNet StockBots continues.

Investing legend Stan Druckenmiller unleashed a firehose of cold water on market bulls today during an interview with the Economic Club of NY (the same venue that will interview Jerome Powell tomorrow on the topic of negative interest rates), when he said the “The risk-reward for equity is maybe as bad as I’ve seen it in my career,” (although “the wild card here is the Fed can always step up their purchases”) , Read More.

Thirty years of progressively higher consumer spending and debt have coincided with rising corporate profits, low savings rates, gambling preoccupation and boom-bust asset cycles. All were deleterious to present resilience as we encounter the first economic depression since the 1930s. Read More.

How bad is it? That is the question on everyone’s mind as we come to grips with the economic carnage caused by global economic shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, and ongoing quarantines of million of people. Do we face another Great Depression, or simply a deep recession more like 2008? And equally important, are soft Americans prepared for either?Read More.

David Rosenberg bluntly told attendees Monday at John Mauldin’s Virtual Strategic Investment Conference 2020 that the stock rallies in recent weeks ignore reality and don’t recognize that the United States is likely entering a depression, facing double-digit unemployment for at least three years, secular changes in consumer spending and saving, and deflation followed by stagflation. Read More.

After eleven years of nearly uninterrupted advancement, the record-long, QE-spawned bull market is on life support, facing the effects of pandemic lockdown and a massively leveraged global financial system. Read More.