{"id":377411,"date":"2018-09-15T21:37:45","date_gmt":"2018-09-15T20:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/prison-planet-com-the-global-economys-fundamental-weakness\/"},"modified":"2018-09-15T21:37:45","modified_gmt":"2018-09-15T20:37:45","slug":"prison-planet-com-the-global-economys-fundamental-weakness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/prison-planet-com-the-global-economys-fundamental-weakness\/","title":{"rendered":"Prison Planet.com \u00bb The Global Economy\u2019s Fundamental Weakness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Richard Kozul-Wright<\/strong>
Project Syndicate<\/a>
September 14, 2018<\/p>\n

Over the course of the past decade, the global economy has recovered from the 2008 financial crisis by riding a wave of debt and liquidity injections from the major central banks. Yet in the absence of steady wage growth and productive investments in the real economy, the only direction left to go is down.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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When Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy ten years ago, it suddenly became unclear who owed what to whom, who couldn\u2019t pay their debts, and who would go down next. The result was that interbank credit markets froze, Wall Street panicked, and businesses went under, not just in the United States but around the world. With politicians struggling to respond to the crisis, economic pundits were left wondering whether the \u201cGreat Moderation\u201d of low business-cycle volatility since the 1980s was turning into another Great Depression.<\/p>\n

In hindsight, the complacency in the run-up to the crisis was clearly unconscionable. <\/strong>And yet little has changed in its aftermath. To be sure,\u00a0we are told<\/a>\u00a0that the financial system is simpler, safer, and fairer. But the banks that benefited from public money are now bigger than ever; opaque financial instruments are once again\u00a0de rigueur<\/em>; and bankers\u2019 bonus pools are overflowing. At the same time, un- or under-regulated \u201cshadow banking\u201d has grown into a\u00a0$160 trillion business<\/a>. That is twice the size of the global economy.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the trillions of dollars of liquidity that major central banks have pumped in to the global economy over the past decade, asset markets have rebounded, company mergers have gone into overdrive, and\u00a0stock buybacks<\/a>\u00a0have become a benchmark of managerial acumen.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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By contrast, the real economy has spluttered along through ephemeral bouts of optimism and intermittent talk of downside risks. <\/strong>And while policymakers tell themselves that high stock prices and exports will…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Kozul-WrightProject SyndicateSeptember 14, 2018 Over the course of the past decade, the global economy has recovered from the 2008 financial crisis by riding a wave of debt and liquidity injections from the major central banks. Yet in the absence of steady wage growth and productive investments in the real economy, the only direction left […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-377411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}