The Real Economic Crisis Everyone Missed: Part II

"The U.S. economic recovery (of the 1990s) was built largely on the savings amassed in the halcyon decades of the Second Industrial Revolution, combined with record credit and debt.  We became a nation of runaway spenders.  It turns out that the money we were spending, however, was not so much new money generated by new income.  American (real) wages had been slowly leveling off and declining as the Second Industrial Revolution passed into its mature stage in the 1980s.


"We lifted the global economy on the back of American purchasing power.  What we weren't willing to admit to ourselves, however, was that the whole thing was paid for by depleting the savings of American households."

 The Third Industrial Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin