Starvin Larry

Last December, in “Oil Ushers in the Depression,” SLL said that oil was on the leading edge of global economic and financial contraction.

The future is now. The carnage in the oil sector, where a glut has knocked over a third off its price in less than five months, is not an aberration, but a harbinger—the shape of things to come across sectors and around the world. It kicks off the depression, or more accurately, the resumption of the depression that started in either 2000 or 2007 (let the statisticians quibble about that determination).

That forecast may have seemed extreme at the time. The global economy was still growing, albeit slowly. Mainstream economists were predicting that 2015 would be the year it reached liftoff velocity, thanks to central banks’ quantitative easing and interest rate suppression. Those predictions betrayed appalling ignorance of the central force in the global economy—debt—and…