Doug wrote
>A balanced budget, 1.4% inflation, 4.3% unemployment, 296,000 new jobs in
>May, 3% year-to-year real wage increases....
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>It may not be utopia, but who's doing better?
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>Doug
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If prices can't go up much (for reasons you mentioned in an earlier post) and if profts are being squeezed, mightn't the question be how long this relatively "good" picture can remain? If this world economy continues to move as it is doing, perhaps we're looking not at some kind of anomaly of the capitalist accumulation cycle, but at kind of capitalist dynamic not before seen in world economic history. Perhaps we now have a world economy that uses American military-financial institutions to squeeze profits out of poor countries much more efficiently than ever before, thus making it possible for wages to go up modestly in America without price hikes over much longer periods of time--say fifty years, rather than the fifteen or twenty we have been used to historically--before a crisis comes along that can't be managed by Summers and the Pentagon.
Steve
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********************** Steven R. Cohen lomco at pipeline.com