We have shown in the previous three episodes (episode 1, 2 and 3) how the US economy structurally changed after Nixon took the US off gold, letting the Federal Reserve do what it does best. Obviously, with the “hard” anchor of the US dollar cut loose, the rest followed suit. It is telling that the…
In the first episode we showed how the US became an unsustainable service sector based economy from the 1970s onward when service sector employment diverged from manufacturing without a corresponding boost in productivity. In the second episode we laid out the consequences that transition has had on labour in terms of lower wages and benefits….
In Episode 1 we showed how the US labour market changed dramatically from the 1970s on back of excess money printing which allowed Americans to buy tradable goods on the international market, hollowing out its own manufacturing base, and essentially creating an unsustainable consumer driven economy where the broad masses get their employment within service sector….
In several articles we have shown how the world changed from the 1970s with the breakdown of the old Bretton-Woods system. For example, in China’s unfortunate dependence on the Eurodollar expansion we showed how economies like Japan and China boomed on the back of what appeared to be real demand for their products, but was nothing…