Since the start of 2022, there has been crisis after crisis, and now the war in Ukraine is depressing economic activity all over the planet.  What we are facing could most definitely be described as a "perfect storm", and the truth is that this storm isn't going to go away any time soon.  But where do we go from here?  Will the U.S. economy bounce back, or will this new economic downturn soon become even worse?  Most economic optimists are assuming that the former will be true, while many economic realists are issuing dire warnings about what is ahead.

I was actually thinking of writing about something else today, but I knew that my regular readers would want me to talk about this…

Gross domestic product unexpectedly declined at a 1.4% annualized pace in the first quarter, marking an abrupt reversal for an economy coming off its best performance since 1984, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

The negative growth rate missed even the subdued Dow Jones estimate of a 1% gain for the quarter, but the initial estimate for Q1 was the worst since the pandemic-induced recession in 2020.

We already knew that inflation had started to spiral out of control in the United States, and now the "stag" part of "stagflation" has arrived.

So what caused this "sudden" downturn?  According to CNN, there are quite a few factors that can be blamed…

A push by the Federal Reserve to rai