Ping!
“Unrecognizable?”
Not to those who have studied the history of the 1933 to 1940 and 1873 to 1879 depressions it isn’t.
This is a classic debt deflation, per Irving Fisher’s description of same in 1935.
The only people who might not recognize this for what it is are people who are still gulping down the either the Kool-Aid of idiots like the National Ass’n of Realtors (for whom there is NEVER a bad time to buy a house), or their used bong water. These people are, sadly, everywhere, but saddest of all, they’ve been most especially abundant in the “George Bush’s economy is A-OK!” and “Dude, where’s my recession?!” camps of erstwhile conservatives, who should know better.
The patterns of what are happening are unfolding in the order as laid out by Fisher in his paper, in the same order he describes. Once I read Hyman Minsky’s paper on debt collapses and Fisher’s paper on debt-deflation, it became pretty clear to me that history repeats itself.
The only ‘unrecognizable’ component of this time ‘round is that we now are beholden to foreign investors, sovereign wealth funds and foreign central banks, praying that they continue to buy our US-backed paper even as we’re issuing yet more debt as fast as we can. At some point, our creditors will cease believing that they will get paid whole, and they’ll quit buying.