In 1880, the financial sector’s share of US GDP was slightly over 1%. By 2009, however, it had grown close to 10%. Including the related industries of insurance and real estate, that share swells to 21% in 2019, making it the single largest segment of the American economy, followed by trade and transport at 15% and professional services at 13%. Not until 4th place do we find manufacturing, at 11%, down from close to 35% in the 1940s for a country that once outproduced all others, and whose chief export today is government promises to pay in the future. With the meltdowns in the financial markets over the past several decades and the increasingly large government interventions to rescue and prop them up, political blogger ZMAN joins us to discuss how sustainable this is and its ramifications for society going forward.
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Myth of the 20th Century – Episode 180 – The Money Game – ZMAN on Financialization of the Economy
— References —
– The Money Game, Smith (1968)
– Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe, Bachrach (1977)
– The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, Hoffman (2001)
– The Jewish Century, Slezkine (2004)
– Research desk responds: The financialization of the economy, Klein (2010) – http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/06/research_desk_responds_the_fin.html
– Convergence of Catastrophes, Faye (2012)
– Changing the lens: GDP from the industry viewpoint, Deloitte (2019) – https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/economy/spotlight/economics-insights-analysis-07-2019.html
– Commodity Financialization (and Why It Matters), Kharlamov and Flassbeck (2019) – https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/commodity-financialization-and-why-it-matters/
– The Z Man – Reaching the Tipping Point, Myth of the 20th Century (2020) – https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2019/10/09/the-z-man-reaching-the-tipping-point/
– Athens In Winter, ZMAN (2020) – https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=20685
– The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, Kotkin (2020)
– The Rise and Fall of General Electric, Myth of the 20th Century (2020) – https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2020/06/25/the-rise-and-fall-of-general-electric/
– Fireworks, Tear Gas and a ‘Wall of Moms’: Thousands Again Protest in Portland, Flaccus (2020) – https://time.com/5871748/fireworks-tear-gas-protest-portland/
– Matt Levine – Bloomberg – https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine
– Alternate Unemployment Charts – http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. -Francis Parker Yockey
