While it is difficult to properly attribute blame for the collapse of the US economy, which commenced in the early 1980s, on either the Fed's policy of easy money starting with Alan Greenspan (and terminating with today's statement by Goldman that merely a suggestion of "not easing" may be equivalent to "tightening" - a symptom of a terminal junkie), or the resultant self-indulgent lifestyle of the maturing baby boomers, one thing is certain: the paradigm downturn of the United States began in the early 1980s. And here we are willing to break the cardinal rule of statistics and assume that correlation does imply causation. Because the 4 simple charts below don't lie: the US economy, as represented by its Balance of Payments, the profligacy of the US consumer, the massive expansion of consumer leverage, and the collapse in US manufacturing jobs, and specifically its current near-terminal state, is as much as legacy of the baby boom generation's actions (and lack thereof), as of everything else that has already been mulled over and scapegoated an infinite number of times in both the mainstream and fringe media.
Charts courtesy of John Lohman
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