Compared to the robust growth rates of the boom decades in the years from the end of World War II until 1973, the U.S. economy has witnessed a stubborn stagnation. At the core of this stagnation lies a slowdown in the rates of productivity, which is the beating pulse of a dynamic economy and an output per hour of growth by workers in a country. Productivity is the stepping-stone to a great economic leap forward, it’s where Adam

Economists and analysts of the 2007-2009 financial meltdown usually take the domestic housing and securities markets as the point of departure in their prognoses of the crisis. While refusing to look beyond the apparent roots of the malaise, they continue to begrudge the decline in housing prices as the bedrock of the financial crunch. And, that, of course, makes perfect sense. With a housing bubble bursting by the end of 2006 that forced the prices