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SLL has been predicting depression since last year (see “Oil Ushers in the Depression,” SLL, 12/1/14), not just the recession at which the statistics now seem to be pointing. That prediction is grounded on a few facts. The world is more indebted than it has ever been and debt has grown far faster than underlying economies for decades. The global economy is saturated. Years of central bank monetization of financial assets and interest rate suppression, culminating in the most massive such effort in history over the last six years, have driven the marginal return on productive investment to less than zero, left the global economy with huge surpluses of everything except solvency, and retarded saving, the true source of future economic growth. Finally, governments and central banks have no pixie dust left to counter economic contraction and its attendant financial stress. Short-term interest rates are zero, or in some cases negative; with the world choking on it, additional debt only imposes additional costs and no benefits, and central bank balance sheets are already grotesquely swollen relative to their equity capital.