It's wake up time.  For months, there has been a tremendous amount of denial out there.  So many of the "experts" assumed that the Federal Reserve and other central banks had everything under control and that things would "return to normal" before too long.  But that hasn't happened.  Instead, the wheels seem to be coming off the bus and nobody seems to know what to do.  The Fed appears to be determined to keep raising interest rates in a desperate attempt to fight inflation, and this has forced other central banks all over the globe to raise rates as well in order to keep their currencies from absolutely tanking.  But all of these interest rate hikes are taking us into a major global economic downturn, and central bankers in Europe are literally screaming at the Fed to end the madness.

But the Fed is not going to end the madness, and so things are going to get really bad.

In fact, Bank of America is now projecting that the U.S. economy will lose 175,000 jobs a month during the first quarter of 2023…

As pressure from the Fed's war on inflation builds, nonfarm payrolls will begin shrinking early next year, translating to a loss of about 175,000 jobs a month during the first quarter, the bank said. Charts published by Bank of America suggest job losses will continue through much of 2023.

"The premise is a harder landing rather than a softer one," Michael Gapen, head of US economics at Bank of America, told CNN in a phone interview Monday.