The Top 40

The rise is perfectly coterminous with the abandonment of the gold standard. Quelle surprise !

$5T to over $90T in the ensuing 3 decades

WAF'ed

Another point related to cotaorprions, but from a slightly different (varieties of capitalism) POV: in America corporatism is a very bad word, and often because the word is misused.For both the (anarchist) Left and Right it means the combination of government and business and this is bad because this gives business more power over society (the Left) and/or because it gives government more power over society (the Right).Often quoted is Mussolini's quote about how Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. Thus the Left and Right both use that quote to their own ideological ends and throw the f-word at anything and everything they don't like (think of the Tea Party & Glenn Beck in recent years).The problem is that Mussolini's quote isn't quite accurate. They have corporatism in present-day Germany, France and many other European societies no one but the most ardent Libertarian or Anarcho-Syndicalist would call these societies fascist in any meaningful sense.Just like cotaorprions come in many different forms, so do corporatisms. America's version of corporatism is one that usually excludes the voice of labor, for example, and I would argue that government here is much more deferential to business than the other way around. European corporatism is tripartist and is much more inclusive of labor's voice as well as that of business management & government.European corporatism has undoubtedly allowed more egalitarian distribution of economic growth between both capital and labor, rich and poor, and I think that the problem in Europe now is that their past corporatist arrangement is breaking down for various reasons.I know the above comment wasn't quite on-topic, but your interesting post got me thinking about a related word that is also often misused and causes much sloppy thinking