Anglo-American capitalism: the wrong growth paradigm?

The Guardian's Larry Elliott is as sharp a newspaper economic commentator as there is who hasn't won the Nobel Prize.

This thought provoking essay is in today's paper. Elliott notes that people are too focused on when to raise interest rates as the U.S. economy staggers back to its feet and slogs forward in the Great Stagnation.

Elliott notes that stimulus from government, either directly or through the Fed maintaining low interest rates, has been what allowed the U.S. economy to recover from every shock since the 1980's but this has led to a situation where "… a bigger and bigger stimulus is required to produce a growth spurt. What's more, the upswings have been weaker than in the 25 years after the second world war, and have been accompanied by larger trade deficits and the relentless hollowing out of manufacturing."

He cites research by economist Thomas Palley in a new book, From Financial Crisis to Stagnation, that show the new economic model since the 1980's "involved squeezing worker incomes, squeezing household saving rates, raising debt levels, persistent asset price inflation in excess of consumer price inflation, and reliance on ever lower nominal (i.e. not adjusted for inflation) interest rates".  The British economy can be described in the same way.

This link will take you to the book's preface and very interesting it is.