Whether it's deleveraging, spare capacity, dollar debasement, productivity gains, or just plain old obesity, in real purchasing power terms, an hour of your time has never been worth less. In the 40 years since Nixon's 1971 fiat-fiasco, the value of the average hourly earnings for US citizens has dropped 90% in terms of Gold. The last time that our labor's efforts garnered such a low value saw a twenty year credit-blown releveraging (from 1980 to 2001) to save-us-all; we suspect that debt saturation will limit the ability of any central bank to create such a 'recovery' in labor-value once again. Since the peak in 2001, 60 minutes of your valuable time has lost 81% of its purchasing power! Is this what globalization looks like?
The average hourly earnings in ounces of Gold...
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Charts: Bloomberg