It could easily be much worse. Last time the Fed slashed interest rates to zero to stop the hemorrhaging. They are STILL at zero seven years later. There are very few bullets left in the gun without resorting to outright counterfeiting. This has already started in Japan and Europe (quantitative easing).
The entire system is leveraged to the hilt and nothing will stop the deflationary pressure when the money multiplier of fractional reserve lending runs in reverse. There could be bank holidays. After that, capital controls.
This will be much different than what's happening in Ukraine. It will be a deflationary collapse.
In the US... They've doubled the money supply in the last decade, and the only tool is printing more, where does deflation come in, in this equation?
less than 10% of U.S. dollars are created by Federal Reserve balance sheet expansion. The rest are created when fractional reserve banks lend out demand deposits, meaning the money is in two places at once. (in your checking account and with the loan recipient). This is the money multiplier. But when banks stop lending as they did in 2008, the existing loans still are getting paid back so the money created out of thin air disappears. The money multiplier runs in reverse. Less money chasing the same amount of goods and services= deflation.
Indeed. The '08-'09 crisis showed an impressive drop that hasn't recovered:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MULT So what do we think happens if/when it *does* recover, after base-money has been expanded by $Ts? Can and will the Fed contract *perfectly*? This all boils down to how well they can thread the needle.
I don't know about you guys, but my bet is that a small group of people can't perfectly handle an increasingly complex (mathematically chaotic) system with almost absolute perfection over arbitrarily long time-periods.
That said, the only hope is an unprecedented US-tech driven multi-decade global expansion (which can actually happen if regulators and congress back off for a while).
It's quite likely we passed a complexity point where a small group of people can't perfectly manage this system around the end of the last century.
Volatility has exploded since the late 90's, first a massive stock bubble, then massive crash, then a massive housing bubble, then an even bigger crash, now a more massive debt and central bank bubble.
The fact that the swings are becoming larger and more pronounced shows they are losing the ability to manage all this leverage, which is exactly what you need to do when the banking sector is leveraged more than 10x.
After the last crash, this small group of people openly stated "never again". Meaning they were going to lean on the side of accommodation more than ever before to make absolute sure we're protected against the downside. The reason is the last crash unexpectedly started to run out of their control and demonstrated that their ability to predict and forecast is becoming less and less accurate, which in turn forces them to hedge more and more on the upside.
The problem with this is it means they acknowledged that because they don't understand or can control the system well enough,
it is now necessary to hedge on the upside to make up for this lack of understanding and control.
What this also means is both the next blow up and then crash down will be even more pronounced and even further beyond their control. Your only hedge against this is to get as much as possible out of the banking system and anything it touches.