Has Ben Bernanke Ben Yellen Lies.

By the end of the year 2002, mortgage refinancing had fueled a solid 20% of all US economic growth, and if one took a more granular look, on the East Coast or West, that amount is closer to 33%, ie, more than one third of economic growth, $12 Trillion since 2000.

That was more than a decade ago, showing an economy that had complete dependence on Fed largesse, irresponsibility and wholesale handover of the reins of the  economic system to private banks, ominously dubbed, "The Shadow Economy", even as those same banks, together with the Wall St. firms that were 'packaging' their shoddy mortgages, charging exorbitant fees, and marketing them to suckers around the world, were fined $1.2 billion, having deceived investors with biased research, yet never admitting any wrong doing
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At that time it would cost $800 for a PC with a microporcessor speed of 1.8g, 250M of ram, 40-60 gigahertz including a 15' monitor, while the single-hulled Prestige lay leaking 120 tons of oil a day off the Spanish coast.

The New Year, this is 2003, started with Robert Prechter seeing utter devastation for stocks, as Eliot Wave international posted fractal patterns they determined were signalling horrific equity losses accompanied with steep drops in currencies, commodities and bonds.

This firm was developed on the theories of accountant Ralph Nelson Elliott, called Wave Theory, which posits that all events, whether psychological, physical, or technical repeat themselves. It seems that electrical has a lesson to illuminate the reasons this is true are that, DC current, if pushed hard enough long enough, develop increasing resistance, requiring that more and more power is required to move it further (so, at least in the current world, resistance is NOT futile, brute force having to be applied in larger and larger increments to receive smaller and smaller results: just  like QE). AC current however, being cyclical, allows the resistance to dissipate before it builds up, and is why we use AC for transporting current, transforming it to DC only at the POE (not Edgar Allen, Point Of Entry) to the device that runs on DC, such as computers.

In Prechter's cycles, of which there are ones of the Super variety, smaller trends are always just components of the overall cycle, the way anecdotal weather anomalies don't make a good basis for predicting climate change. He concludes, that there have been two Super-Cycle declines 1929-1932, and 1837-1841, when stocks fell four  years in a row. Even then, in 2003, he maintained that  the country was already in a deflationary depression that would gain momentum over the next 2 1/2 years.

And then, unknowingly predicting the Fed-engineered response of prodding banks to start including un-credit-worthy people to buy houses, Michael Berry said that when the popular mind embraces an investment other than stocks, the ensuing rush'll sweep aside everything in its wake, while Weekly Dig claimed that "Business greed is subverting the American way of life and hurting the image of American Capitalism and Democracy more effectively than the ploys of  foreign enemies." For it demonstrated what Gorbachev had realized, that without the Communist menace purportedly threatening to overtake their economies and deprive them of their vast privileges, Europe would find that its tastes and predilections lined up much more favorably with those of Russia than the US.

So, it was noticed by quite a few eminent people that, notably Reagan And Greenspan, by taking housing and fuel costs out of the CPI, and squeezing wages ever downward, changing income, to "household income", and pushing inflation into "assets" which then could safely be elevated to valuations having nothing to do with their underlying worth, but providing increasing revenues to a Local, via property taxes, and Central Government more and more hostage to the very military mindset it had set out to imbue the entire country with, because most of that revenue got spent on wars, military hardware, R&D for the internet and computers, which were all developed as taxpayer-funded investments, but for which the taxpayer is never thereby enriched. In fact, if you follow the impoverization of the American worker, it follows the same track as the implementation of the internet and computerization, and therefore, the monetization of every aspect of human existence.

What this should shed a light on for people that it doesn't is the fact that Capitalism, from its inception in the waning years of Elizabethan rule, was born of and was utterly dependent on exogenous energy inputs, at that time, in the form of Slavery. The artificial legalization of people as property under the law. It is a marauding monster that even one of its most ardent supporters, Schumpeter, called creative destruction. It destroys the environment of the lowest classes, those most dependent on eking a living out of their surroundings, its latest manifestation being the peasants of China and many other Asian and African countries, who have a decent, no TV (gasp), difficult, life, but they still manage. But in country after country, after The Capitalists take over, the very thin margin of existence is destroyed, despoiled, or stolen, leaving the rich high on the hog and the poor eating their offal. Which they would do, but now it's so filled with concentrated chemical pollution in the liver and kidneys of animals that now even that is awful.

But when such things occur in an emerging economy (again, look at China, it is the 2'nd LARGEST economy on the globe, with a growth rate envied by much more calcified capitalist regimes, and basically pulled the world out of the tailspin into the economic abyss the so-called developed economies sent it into in 2008, yet somehow, it is still "emerging", that is because favorable trade status, with businesses overtly and shamelessly subsidized by the Central Government, could not, cannot, compete (or so it's maintained) with those in "emerged" countries), it is seen as necessary to bring them up to our standard, never facing the fact that a government that's duly  elected in a Democracy in a world of sovereign States has no business conducting policy for the benefit of citizens in other countries, to the detriment of those in its own. But that is exactly what the Central Bank and the Federal government, in the guise of Neo-liberalism, has been doing for decades.

Tidbit: The private automobile uses more resources in its construction than any other product on Earth. And it is at the center of all the OECD countries' economies, the one industry they watch as a measure of growth, the one to which free loans are freely given for a product they freely admit loses a third of its values as it drives, brand new, off the dealers' lots, lost slot machine guaranteed.