Still trying to sell people that they’re better off than before the pan. I am. I got a new job with better benefits. But I got laid-off in two rounds of downsizing before that happened. And I’m sure not everyone who was laid-off has done better since. And the internet tells me people feel squeezed.
If the article said that things didn’t go south as much as we’d feared, I might believe it. But they keep reporting fucking miracles. And I don’t believe in miracles. I can see why conspiracy people feel alienated from news media (I’m not a conspiracy person).
The key to understanding the U.S. economy is not so much GDP as capital (asset-price) gains and the offsetting debt burden financing these gains. This financialized overhead is not real growth. It does not make the economy richer. This paper explains why, and provides a statistical format to measure the magnitude of rent extraction or the [finance, insurance and real estate] sector on the “product” side of the economy, deflating disposable personal income available to spend on goods and services, and capital gains on the “total returns” side, so as to show how most wealth is achieved not by actual production but by increasingly debt-financed asset-price inflation.