much worse than 2008 how? Global debt markets nearly collapsed and the single largest investment of american consumers crashed. You are making a really bold claim there and it looks like cheap catastrophizing.
If you read Ray Dalio, he seems think think the next recession will be a "debt supercycle" which could be worse than 2008. (this could be him plugging his hedge fund, but he's semi retired, and really has no more money needed to make personally) Note also that recessions have been growing longer each cycle. IMHO it's related to the bottom 99% having been getting paid smaller and smaller portions of wealth, and so a base resiliency of economies become weaker each cycle.
It's hard to follow his reasoning sometimes. Sometimes it seems like he's saying that we already went through the debt supercycle, or the end of the long-term debt cycle and we've already gone through the reflation period.
But other times it sounds like he's saying the real "big one" is still about to happen, rather than just another recession.
I haven't ever seen anything from him that says we've gone through it already - he cagey about exactly when (and that's the correct view imo) the next big recession hits, but I see him trying to lay groundwork to allow a few paradigm shifts in how governments have to take on new financial tools if we want to stay stable - e.g. helicopter money. You could get his "Big Debt Crisis" book (I got the free pdf on rollout), that lays out the case in detail with data.
I don't think he saw 2008 as the end as much as it was the start of the end game - the debts have definitely come to any sort of deleveraging beautiful or ugly, and certainly no resolution of the fundamental inequality the Dalio was identifying as a root concern.
I think the next recession will be modest compared to 2008, comparatively shallow in all regards (including job losses). The recovery is going to involve drawn-out weak economic performance, elaborate growth stagnation, that will frustrate central banks as they attempt to stimulate and reinflate. We'll see aggressive front-run Fed & global central bank action. As opposed to 2007-2009, which frequently saw the Fed running from behind to catch up to a very severe implosion. The Fed regularly utilizing QE programs the last time around was quite novel. This time it'll be used very early on and aggressively as a normalized tool of fighting a recession (for better or worse).
The recession will be weak, the recovery will be weak. The repeating behavior and stacking debt is resulting in lower dynamism in all regards. We've already seen all of this: Japan showed us exactly how it works, why (government debt), and how it cycles toward increased stagnation, perma low rates and low inflationary pressure.
The overly dramatic doom predictions are merely making the perceived easy call, and piggyback riding on what happened in 2008. A repeat, much less something worse, is not what we're going to see at all.
