Word: boom
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...thus starting to look like that theoretical impossibility, a perpetual-motion machine: America pays for Asian goods with borrowed money, then Asia uses the profits from these sales to lend more money to its favorite customer. It's a deal that has been beneficial for both sides. A boom in exports to America has fueled economic growth in Japan and China. Asia's eagerness to buy bonds, in turn, has helped America avoid the full consequences of its reckless spending. The U.S. current account deficit touched $542 billion last year and the fiscal deficit, which has burgeoned because...
...good time for his re-election campaign, the GNP was growing a robust 6.8%, while inflation had dropped to 4.3%. And from then on, despite the spectacular but brief stock-market crash in 1987, the boom kept right on booming. Those gains, however, were unequally distributed. Reagan liked to say that the government provided a "safety net" for the "truly needy," but it was during these years that, for the first time since the Depression, there appeared those huddled figures who became known as "the homeless...
...Reagan applied it broadly, to energy and broadcasting and butressed it with a dismantling of antitrust laws. Reagan was a staunch free-trader and did little to stop the onslaught against sluggish American corporations from aggressive Japanese manufacturers. Reagan's term coincided with the height of Japan's economic boom, and his instinct was that in the long run, it would be better to let most companies fend for themselves...
...seems to have produced a more competitive economy, with companies more nimble, more responsive to customers and more innovative, even if their workers felt less secure or loyal. The 1980s shakeout helped prime the economy for its leap into the high-productivity, technology-fueled boom of the next decade...
...real Reagan years, the years of red suspenders and corporate takeovers, of Bonfire of the Vanities and big hair, were shorter than they seem in memory. They began around the middle of his first term, after the 1981 recession gave way to the boom years, and ended midway through his second, when Iran-contra broke and so in some ways did Reagan's spell. But however briefly they lasted, those years habituated us to a giddy, swaggering, saw-toothed capitalism that seemed a bit appalling then. It feels much more familiar now. Because the country had lived through...