And Americans- who had to buy a bunch of cheap crap at Wal Mart have no one but themselves to blame….
Ever since Americans decided it was better to have a bunch of junk than a few nice, high quality things, we’ve been headed in this direction…
When price becomes the most important thing and people elsewhere can make it cheaper, well, you do the math…
This is really as much- if not more of- a failure of the American Value system as it is of American Politics…
From Yahoo News and MarketWatch:
The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.
For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.
And it’s a lot closer than you may think.
According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.
Put that in your calendar.
It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.
According to the IMF forecast, which was quietly posted on the Fund’s website just two weeks ago, whoever is elected U.S. president next year — Obama? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? — will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy.
Most people aren’t prepared for this. They aren’t even aware it’s that close. Listen to experts of various stripes, and they will tell you this moment is decades away. The most bearish will put the figure in the mid-2020s.
via imf-bombshell-age-america-end-marketwatch: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.
Lost in the 21st Century 