While ordinary consumer purchasing power shrank, private debt exploded to fill the gap and giant surpluses were created off the back of high and rising profits.
Most of the songs came from "Whokill," stirring together personal and social concerns: abuses of wealth and power, shrinking opportunity and riots, juxtaposed with thoughts of desire and joy.
The country's ability to industrialize has been hampered by, among other factors, limited domestic purchasing power, shrinking government budgets, increased external and internal debt, poor infrastructure, and massive governmental corruption and mismanagement.
Dreier: What are the key things that progressive organizations need to do today to expand progressive power and shrink corporate power?
Purchasing power shrinks and consumer societies suddenly lack the capacity to consume.
If they have competing interests because they cannot all be in the same businesses, their lobbying power shrinks, he added.
Yet inflation and deflation do have a certain impact upon distribution: if purchasing power shrinks, profits are the first income category to suffer; next come wages, particularly through the effects of unemployment.
Businesses have been absorbing some of the higher costs themselves while passing much of the increase to consumers, intensifying the strain on households just as joblessness expands and spending power shrinks.
The result is a hollowing out of democracy, where actual power shrinks to a tight core at the centre and government loses control of some of the most essential services and structures in our society, so that elections makes less and less difference to citizens and their wellbeing.
As our kid's waist sizes grow, their brain power shrinks.
