Below is a slide I shared at a presentation back in 2015 as the real economy was supposedly healing after the credit crunch.  My point was we were indeed showing some progress, but from a macro standpoint we were still stuck in an ugly debt-demand feed-back loop; i.e. relying on increasing amounts of credit and leverage to supplement for a dearth of real demand.  It is not going far out on a limb to suggest we are now much deeper locked into this dynamic and the great deflation is upon us. Note the box to the right in the slide (reprinted below), which is a summary description from Murray Rothbard’s book, The Great Depression, showing how to prolong a depression. Sound familiar?

How to prolong a depression (Murray Rothbard):

•      Prevent or delay liquidation.

•      Inflate further.

•      Keep wages up.

•      Keep prices up.

•      Stimulate consumption and discourage savings.

And the beat down goes on and on…