> When they squeezed real incomes, they offered rising
> home equity to fill the gap. I think they are out of tricks at this point.
Yep, the housing bubble was their final roll of the dice. Even if they wanted to inflate another bubble, the US middle class doesn't have the cash to invest in it, and the BRICs wouldn't finance it. And Japan and Europe are busy dealing with the meltdowns of their own, localized neoliberalisms.
All of which gives me hope, strange as it sounds. For the first time since the 1960s, we have both a critique of what is -- a completely dysfunctional plutocracy -- and the utopian prospect of something better -- developmental states, digital commons.
-- DRR