U.S.

Average Growth

2007 to 2016

1.3%

Soaring Debt = Slow Growth = Even More Debt = Systemic Crisis

It’s just common sense: Borrow too much money and the weight of this debt makes it hard to do things that used to be easy. This truism is now (finally!) hitting home, and blame is being apportioned. A couple of recent examples:

Over The Last 10 Years The U.S. Economy Has Grown At EXACTLY The Same Rate As It Did During The 1930s

Even though I write about our ongoing long-term economic collapse every day, I didn’t realize that things were this bad.  In this article, I am going to show you that the average rate of growth for the U.S. economy over the past 10 years is exactly equal to the average rate that the U.S. economy grew during the 1930s.  Perhaps this fact shouldn’t be that surprising, because we already knew that Barack Obama was the only president in the entire history of the United States not to have a single year when the economy grew by at least 3 percent.  Of course the mainstream media continues to push the perception that the U.S. economy is in “recovery mode”, but the truth is that this current era has far more in common with the Great Depression than it does with times of great economic prosperity.

The following are U.S. GDP growth rates for every year during the 1930s…

1930: -8.5%
1931: -6.4%
1932: -12.9%
1933: -1.3%
1934: 10.8%
1935: 8.9%
1936: 12.9%
1937: 5.1%
1938: -3.3%
1939: 8.0%

When you average all of those years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.

That is really bad, but it is the kind of number that one would expect from “the Great Depression”.

So then I looked up the numbers for the last ten years…

2007: 1.8%
2008: -0.3%
2009: -2.8%
2010: 2.5%
2011: 1.6%
2012: 2.2%
2013: 1.7%
2014: 2.4%
2015: 2.6%
2016: 1.6%

When you average these years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.

When the "Fix" Increases Systemic Fragility, Things Fall Apart

The "fix" of the last eight years worked, right? This was the status quo's "fix":

1. Massive expansion of debt: sovereign, household and corporate, all in service of a) bringing consumer demand forward b) fiscal stimulus funded by debt c) corporate stock buybacks to boost stock valuations d) asset bubbles in real estate, bonds, stocks, bat guano futures, etc.

2. Monetary stimulus, i.e. creating and distributing money at the top of the wealth/power pyramid so corporations and the super-wealthy could buy more assets with free money for financiers issued by central banks.

3. Gaming statistics such as unemployment and metrics such as stock indices to generate the illusion of "growth," "stability" and "wealth."

4. Saying all the right things: the "recovery" is creating millions of jobs, inflation is low, virtue-signaling is more important than actual increases in inflation-adjusted wages, etc.

And how have the dominant state-protected cartels improved adaptability? They've stifled it at every turn. 

Higher education has jacked up prices for its overpriced marginal-utility "product,"

 ditto the healthcare/Big Pharma cartels,

 the military-industrial cartel (hello overpriced, under-performing F-35 and LCS),

 the banking cartel (love those $35 fees and .01% interest paid on deposits),

 and all the other cartels that dominate our pay-to-play "democracy."

State-protected cartels and monopolies are the death of competition, transparency and adaptability--all essential dynamics in real solutions.

Accountability in the public/private-sector "swamp" is near-zero. A mumbled apology for malfeasance, a hand-slap fine for fraud, a bribe passed off as a "speech fee", revolving doors between government contractors and government agencies

accountability is non-existent at the top of the wealth-power pyramid, while a nickel-bag dealer gets a tenner (10-year gulag sentence) and the federal prosecutor gets a gold star.

 Meanwhile, the real criminals skim millions in ill-gotten embezzlements, frauds and cronyist skims are laughing all the way to their remote havens of wealth.

DYI