Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream,

The stock market has been soaring, but all of the hard economic numbers are telling us that a major global recession is here. This is so reminiscent of what happened back in 2008. Back then, all of the fundamentals were screaming “recession” by the middle of that year, but the equity markets didn’t respond until later. It appears that a similar pattern is playing out right now.

The trade numbers, the manufacturing numbers, the inventory numbers and even the GDP numbers are all saying that a very significant economic slowdown is happening, but stock traders haven’t gotten the memo yet. In fact, stocks had an absolutely great month in October. Of course just like in 2008, stocks will eventually catch up with reality. It is just a matter of time. The following are 18 numbers that scream that a crippling global recession has arrived…

None of the underlying issues that caused our problems back in 2008 and 2009 have been fixed. Instead, we just became even bigger and bolder with our mistakes. In the period between the last recession and today, we witnessed the greatest debt binge in the history of the planet. Now a lot of that debt is starting to go bad, and the Bank for International Settlements says that their “dashboard of risk is flashing red”. The following comes from a recent article in the Guardian entitled “Apocalypse now: has the next giant financial crash already begun?“…

This summer, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pointed out that certain major economies were seeing a sharp rise in debt-to-GDP ratios, which were well outside historic norms. In China, the rest of Asia and Brazil, private-sector borrowing has risen so quickly that BIS’s dashboard of risk is flashing red. In two thirds of all cases, red warnings such as this are followed by a major banking crisis within three years.

And that is exactly what we are heading for. Whether it happens next week or several months from now, the truth is that we are steamrolling toward another great banking crisis, and it will be worldwide in scope.

By the time that it is all said and done, I believe that the economic crisis that we are heading toward will be much worse than what we experienced back in 2008 and 2009. The U.S. economy has never even gotten close to the level it was operating at prior to the last recession, and now the next crisis is upon us.

But until stocks crash here in the United States, most people are going to ignore all of the numbers above and will just keep pretending that everything is going to be just fine.

Just like in 2008, the irrational optimists are going to keep chanting their happy mantras for as long as they possibly can.