While the long arm of the grinding, deep financial crisis continues to haunt the global economic recovery, the big question, debated by the world’s pundits, is whether the decades-long disinflation will be followed by an equally lengthy return to a ’60s, ’70s or early ’80s-type intensifying inflation. The preliminary answer might lie in the factors that underlie the genesis of these economically debilitating phenomenon:
Although deterred by the Korean “police action” in the early 1950s, America’s unimpeded economic expansion did not hit a brick wall until President Lyndon B. Johnson employed a disastrous “guns and butter” policy that included a major debacle in Vietnam, as well as a costly “war on poverty,” both of which turned out to be multibillion-dollar losses.