Quote from achilles28:
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In my opinion, this is not the Great Depression or Japan.
Japan saw equities quadruple and real estate appreciate over 5000%.
The monetary base was throttled by a full 1/3rd in the Great Depression; largely due to the gold standard and the FED's unwillingness to lend out excess gold reserves.
The USD is now totally fiat. The specter of a decade-long Great Depression is not possible. And unlike Japan, US consumer discretionary income will soon be freed up.
If the economy was left to seed in '08, we'd get a complete collapse of the banking system and stock market, massive private and commercial bankruptcies followed by a swift recapitalization of new banks financed by insolvent ones. Then a sharp stock recovery. And shortly after, growth.
This is the way it works. All the homeowners should have gone bankrupt. All the banks holding that paper = bankrupt. Let the system purge itself of the excess malinvestment, allow debts to be wiped through bankruptcy, price levels readjust significantly down, and system resets at the new equilibrium. Instead, we're carrying insolvent borrowers, on insolvent mortgages, for insolvent banks, on the taxpayers dime. Price levels should be significantly lower but aren't, because the FED monetized losses which debased the currency and kept consumer prices unrealistically high. This is the hidden tax that no one talks about - the mechanism through which the true cost of the bailout is passed on to dollar holders - sky high cost of living expenses.
The FED has made the problem much worse for political and nepotistic expediency. Losses must be realized. By postponing the inevitable through a slow bleed and nationalization, commercial lenders remain precarious and borrowers remain on the hook for loans that should have been written off a long time ago. Now, it's an agonizing crawl punctuated with semi-annual volleys of QE to stave off another round of deflation for bankers. Each time QE comes in, prices juice up which adds more of a headwind to the economy.