The United States, with growing inequality making the political environment favorable to more debt-financed consumption (as I argue in Chapter 1), was a prime candidate to be the new demander of last resort. However, the policies in the early years of this century that pushed it firmly into the role of the world’s new designated spender were driven by a new phenomenon: recoveries in the United States were increasingly “jobless,” and the U.S. safety net was wholly inadequate to cope with them.
