gmorinJeff, could you elaborate a bit on your remark “The monetary inflation and credit expansion of the Fed found outlets around the world during this time, which permitted American companies to earn profits (and stock markets to soar) while price inflation at home was kept in check”
If I understand, it sounds like you are saying basically the fed created money but it shipped it all overseas so we did not see the result of the inflation here? Is that correct, if so how did they do that? If I had to guess I’d say maybe that the Fed was buying government debt of foreign governments? So those countries now had all these dollars and it permitted them to print up their own fiat and exchange it with themselves – because the US dollar is the world reserve the only way they can inflate their own currency is if we inflate ours? Correct? So all that government spending overseas drove buying of American goods during the 80s and 90s… ? but I thought our trade deficit got bigger during that time frame… or is that really irrelevant in that although the gap got bigger the overall amount of goods and services flowing grew substantially as well? Sorry for all the questions, just trying to build a thumbnail sketch of what the fed was doing to quickly debunk the Clinton apologists.