The One Chart You Need to Predict the Future
We are witnessing a profound secular sea-change: the failure of expanding debt and leverage to lift the real economy of wages and household income.
When push comes to shove, you only need one chart to predict the future: debt and wages ( credit and compensation). This chart displays debt and wages as a ratio: debt/wages. What it reveals is the endgame of financialization: creating more debt no longer pushes wages higher.
I have broken the past five decades into easily recognizable economic periods. During the organic growth of the 1960s that many view as the ideal–what I term the pre-financialized economy, the line is almost flat, as debt and wages expanded in a balanced fashion.
The 1970s, a rocky period of stagflation, higher energy costs and painful adjustments to the economy, is remarkably stable when boiled down to the debt/wage ratio.
Financialization–the securitization of previously stable assets, the expansion of leverage and speculative financial instruments–began in the early 1980s. We see the effect of rapidly expanding debt on the economy: the line leaps higher and only flattens out in the tech-boom 1990s.
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