Re: three bears metaphor killed

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:47 AM 4/5/00 -0400, you wrote:
> >Summary: The cheering of the U.S. economy's success should be tempered by
> >the fact of private debt accumulation.
>
> I ran across an article by Harry Braverman in the '56 American Socialist
> that makes almost the identical point.

yeah, and there was no significant crisis to follow. There _was_ a
recession in 1958, as unemployment rose from 4.3 percent in 1957 to 6.8
percent in 1968. Unemployment fell a bit and then rose to 6.7 in 1961, then
started its decline, bottoming out at 3.5 percent in 1969. I don't know
anything about the causes of the late 1950s recession. (Does anyone on
pen-l know?)

The U.S. economy is quite different now. I can't predict the future, but
it's pretty weird when the U.S. as a whole is borrowing money to pay
interest on outstanding foreign debt. If Robert Schiller can say that U.S.
stock markets are in effect Ponzi schemes, then maybe the U.S. as a whole
can run such a scheme.... Ponzi schemes eventually collapse, because it
becomes harder and harder to sell IOUs in order to pay interest and/or
dividends on pre-existing IOUs as the total number of IOUs increases.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine