| For sure. It is a matter of some interest to know that assumptions were pessimistic on the very eve of a more robust expansion. It is similar to my amusement when the Asian Tigers tanked, not because I wish them ill, but because I was sick of hearing that we ought to follow their lead, when I had an inkling of their weaknesses, for example, in real estate inflation and the corrupt triangle of industrialists, politicians, and bankers, leading to the politcization of liquidity, and therefore of investment. The view of our economy and position in the world that carried over from mostly liberal sources in the '90s was ludicrously wrong. Remember, Paul Kennedy was counselling us to reconcile ourselves to the decline of American power on the international stage just as the Soviet Empire was tanking and we were on the eve of a unipolar world. We were deindustrializing, although, of course, we were on the verge of the first draft of the Knowledge Economy. The Japanese were buying up everything--- although, as it turned out, most of their investments didn't pan out, and some were outright exaggerated. The British remaindered our principal foreign investors, as they have pretty much always been, even in Rockefeller Center, where the Japanese never owned more than an eighth share. So, through the lenses of all the alarmist nonsense, it was practically inevitable that predictions leading up to the millennium be pessimistic. |
