Commentary 
Many have started to wonder, how will the economy land—hard or soft? Often times people tend to have uneasy feelings about the economy before an economic crisis arrives. They somehow know that things are “off” in a serious way, but cannot really put their finger on it.
With the spiking inflation, economic realities have staged a massive comeback in the lives of ordinary people. Macroeconomics is back! (With a vengeance.)
When the global financial crisis, or GFC, hit in September 2008 with the failure of venerable investment bank Lehman Brothers, the severity of the crisis was revealed to the majority of people. Some economists, like myself, had watched the developments in the murky world of securitization and the increasing stress in the banking sector with a heavy heart since, at least, the fall of 2007. I had actually warned my Ph.D. student colleagues already in late 2006 that something ‘was up’ in the world economy. In January 2008, I shorted the U.S. stock market with every penny I had and could borrow….