stagflation

Despite all the worry over the impact of rising oil prices, recall that the U.S. is now a largely services-based economy. And observe that the rising wages that have led to real overall cost rises in decades past are nowhere to be found today. Exhibit A is in Wisconsin.

Amid a bounce back in manufacturing activity, surging commodity prices are leading to fears of inflationary forces. Those forces are real, but corporate profits -- and therefore, stock prices -- won't suffer too quickly. The pain for struggling Americans, though, could be rapid and severe.

A further 18% overall profit increase this year, in an economy facing numerous challenges both domestically and overseas? Don't count on it.

As my colleague Douglas McIntyre described in "Unemployment problems are worse than meet the eye," unemployment in this recession is different -- what many are calling structural unemployment, meaning a decline in the jobs base, which is not going to bounce back quickly due to deep structural...

Run for your lives! The buck is burning, the greenback is crashing, the almighty dollar is in danger of going the way of the British Pound as the world's No. 1 reserve currency. Or so say the dollar doubters. Are they right? Only time will tell, but the foundering dollar is having a very salutary...

As a student of history, I often wonder what it would be like to live in another era. I imagine myself, fedora-clad, smoking my way through the 1930's or perhaps wearing something in a nice olive green and smoking my way through Europe in the early '40s. Alternately, I could even see myself in a...

Dig out your lava lamps and put on your pukka-shell necklaces. While some of the 1970's cultural excesses, like vomit-orange cars and pea-green appliances, might never return, one of the dominant cultural forces of the denim decade may be on its way back. Stagflation. Stagflation, which is on the...