It is of paramount importance to every individual in a modern civilized community that banking credit should have the same solidity as coined money.
– Charles Connant, “Principles of Money and Banking,” 1905
In The Return of the Great Depression, I predicted that “the consensus scenario will gradually transform from Green Shoots into Jobless Recovery, which will remain the mainstream consensus until it begins to become apparent in the autumn of 2010 that even Jobless Recovery is too optimistic.”
It would appear I was somewhat too optimistic myself despite my frequent contentions that we are passing through the early stages of a large-scale economic contraction that will last more than a decade. It is only summer, and yet already the dread “double-dip” term is being regularly bandied about, while the last champion of Neo-Keynesian economics, Paul Krugman, has begun to hedge his bets by complaining that the two previous stimulus packages were too small and talking about “the third depression.”