The phenomenon of “ups and downs” is both a consequence and an indicator of a PTS condition: where there is one there is the other, and the point is, there are no other causes to ups and downs than a PTS condition.
If you consider as examples of “downs”, say, the crashes of 1929, 1932−1933 and 2008, you may get an idea of how serious this PTS condition thing can get.

And that is the reason why I decided to list here the so−called “business cycle” and its PTS ups and downs as another crime against humanity in itself: the order of magnitude. When you throw a nuclear bomb and wipe away a couple of million lives immediately and another couple million lives at your leisure, well, that’s definitely a crime against humanity in itself, quite in addition to any other crime perpetrated, isn’t it? Back to the examples above, just try to conceive the sheer amount of hope, growth and momentum accumulated by a whole people during decades of expansion, and once you got an idea of its total amount, imagine the extent of casualties – human as well as “economic” – when that total amount is made to collapse all at once on all that people’s heads, with ruthless premeditation. If that’s not a crime against humanity, then tell me what qualifies as such.

Even tough some may find hard to believe that it is possible to profit from busts, actually there are endless ways to do so. Roughly speaking, we could say there are three levels of exploiters employing three different strategies.
The small fry gamble and thus end up with speculative bubbles in their hands with the fuse lit; consequentially some – or all – the bubbles can get out of their hands and blow, and when that happens they don’t want to be the ones to lose their hands. Hence their pressures and sleights of hand to palm the bubbles off on someone else before the fuse runs out – just like in the cartoons. Their loot is that of a chain letter, a Ponzi, pyramid scheme: the one who loses out what the others profit is the one left holding the bag when the fuse runs out.

The big fishes don’t need to gamble for the very good reason that they rig the roulette wheel directly. The following, mentioned by Jim Marrs, comes in handy as an example: in 2010, an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform caused an immense leak of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico that caused untold destruction to the ecosystems, the economies, the traditions, the communities, the health and the lives of countless residents of the Gulf regions, including lost jobs, lost abilities to work, lost homes, memory loss, unpredictable long−term health impacts on people, ecosystems and economies and, icing on the cake, the wait for the promised compensations… In the face of all that, the Deepwater Horizon was owned by Transocean and operated by British Petroleum (BP), Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers were Transocean’s financial advisers, and aside from BP and its Gulf Coast partners Goldman Sachs, Transocean and Halliburton all enjoying major gains in corporate profits as a result of the spill, the point here is that internal e−mails revealed that Goldman Sachs profited from the Gulf disaster by short−selling Transocean stock one day before the explosion. Goldman Sachs insiders bet that the stock would go down. And it did. A commenter added that Goldman Sachs did the same with airline stocks prior to 9/11, then again with the housing bubble. Got the gist?
Last, but not least, the real big fishes have better things to do than such daily minutiae as ruining the lives of a few thousand or million people. Noblesse oblige, they have to operate the tap of money itself, in either a “small” or “big” cycle as discussed above under the ambiguous money cycle. Whether banksters enticing customers into debt in order to expropriate them in the medium term, or ultimate moneypulators hollowing out money from the inside in order to suck the blood of whole peoples with it and then bury them all under its final collapse in the long term, if you got the orders of magnitude of the previous levels as well as their gist, now it’s time to get an idea of the order of magnitude of this ultimate level of the booms and busts of this crime against humanity known as “business cycle”. Again, the following, mentioned by Len Clampett and quoted in overflight, comes in handy as an example; however, I cannot emphasise enough that it may be not that trivial conceiving the actual order of magnitude at this level, so, however revealing this example may be, please do not consider it more than a mere appetizer among the appetizers, in view of the main courses. In 1891 a confidential circular was sent to American bankers and their agents, containing the following statements: “We authorise our loan agents in the western States to loan our funds on real estate, to fall due on September 1st 1894, and at no time thereafter. On September 1, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On September 1st we will demand our money – we will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two−thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi and thousands of them east of the great Mississippi as well, at our own price. We may as well own three−fourths of the farms of the west and the money of the country. Then the farmers will become tenants, as in England.” Do I need to say more? Yep: as I previously said, this is but warming up the engines; a specific case in time and space to be compared to global moneypulation.

Now, orders of magnitude aside, I previously said there is no reason under the sun for “down” parts of “business cycles” but suppression; now it’s worth pointing out that this applies to any “down”: cycle or no cycle, regardless of being part or not of whatever “cycle”, any “down” in itself is only a matter of suppression, period.

Recession is the economy that trends dramatically down, with decreasing production, increasing unemployment, and all the rest of suppression effects. Stagnation is a lesser degree of recession, in that the economy trends down less dramatically or even stays level; it is however negative because of the missed wealth or improvement – whatever that improvement is – and also because it tends to last. Stagnation and recession are expected by the mainstream economists to be mutually exclusive with inflation, because inflation would result from abundant and cheap money which, as blood in the organism, should stimulate people to undertake, invest… and get into debt with the moneypulators, goes without saying. And then stagflation contradicts such mainstream expectation, in that stagflation is stagnation or recession occuring in the presence of inflation.
Since it is moneypulators who decide how much money exists, and in whose hands as well, the cause of stagflation could be that, while in the phase of throwing chum into the water, their impatience and greed take the upper hand, and so they keep for themselves a higher percentage of the money they create and grant a lesser percentage of it to their targets: us.
After all, we have seen in the ripple effect of inflation above, and here in the “business cycle”, what is their goal and plan in the first place: the money created is intended to roll down their pyramid of accomplices and servants anyway, hence a little fidgeting with their taps won’t alter significantly the intended course of events: a financial bubble storming across a starving world.

What are inflation, deflation, recession, stagnation and stagflation, in the final analysis and in the first place?
As Thomas Jefferson put it with perfect lucidity, “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.” In other words, such occurrences are effects, and effects are caused: they are made. They are man made, and since their effects are suppressive, let’s just call things with their name: suppression.
Einstein said something on the order of, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” And by calling things with their name, we can move from the lower level of the mechanisms of suppression, in which we would keep on losing ourselves in the maze of inflation, deflation, recession, stagnation, stagflation, and all the rest of it, to the upper level of the intentions, and see clearly at last. Also because, while we move up, we cross the intermediate level in which we understand how all these various mechanisms share a common denominator: they are all but mere wealth transfer mechanisms. Wealth transfer the means, suppression the aim.