The bottom line is, billions of people, not just us, benefit from the high performance of the U.S. economy, so what can we do to keep it functioning so well? The key conundrum is how we have managed to have such strong growth and associated tight labor markets, with subdued, even declining, inflation.
Some of the credit clearly goes to global forces that Americans don’t control and which can’t be counted on to continue pushing in the same direction forever. The world financial crisis has weakened demand for internationally traded goods, especially commodities, including agricultural products, metals, and oil (although the oil price has come back up recently as producing countries cut supply).