DEFLATION

Economic activity decreases and we have a recession. If the recession becomes too severe and inflation is no longer a problem, the central bank will lower interest rates to cause everything to pick up again. With low interest rates, debt repayments are reduced and borrowing and spending pick up and we see another expansion. As you can see, the economy works like a machine. In the short term debt cycle, spending is constrained only by the willingness of lenders and borrowers to provide and receive credit.

When credit is easily available, there's an economic expansion. When credit isn't easily available, there's a recession. And note that this cycle is controlled primarily by the central bank. The short term debt cycle typically lasts 5 - 8 years and happens over and over again for decades. But notice that the bottom and top of each cycle finish with more growth than the previous cycle and with more debt. Why? Because people push it — they have an inclination to borrow and spend more instead of paying back debt.

It's human nature. Because of this, over long periods of time, debts rise faster than incomes creating the Long Term Debt Cycle. Despite people becoming more indebted, lenders even more freely extend credit. Why? Because everybody thinks things are going great! People are just focusing on what's been happening lately. And what has been happening lately? Incomes have been rising! Asset values are going up! The stock market roars!

It's a boom! It pays to buy goods, services, and financial assets with borrowed money! When people do a lot of that, we call it a bubble. So even though debts have been growing, incomes have been growing nearly as fast to offset them. Let's call the ratio of debt-to-income the debt burden. So long as incomes continue to rise, the debt burden stays manageable. At the same time asset values soar. People borrow huge amounts of money to buy assets as investments causing their prices to rise even higher.

People feel wealthy. So even with the accumulation of lots of debt, rising incomes and asset values help borrowers remain creditworthy for a long time. But this obviously can not continue forever. And it doesn't. Over decades, debt burdens slowly increase creating larger and larger debt repayments. At some point, debt repayments start growing faster than incomes forcing people to cut back on their spending. And since one person's spending is another person's income, incomes begin to go down... ...which makes people less creditworthy causing borrowing to go down.

Debt repayments continue to rise which makes spending drop even further... ...and the cycle reverses itself. This is the long term debt peak. Debt burdens have simply become too big. For the United States, Europe and much of the rest of the world this happened in 2008. It happened for the same reason it happened in Japan in 1989 and in the United States back in 1929. Now the economy begins Deleveraging.