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net working capital

That word is beginning to be whispered: "recession." That means the recession probably started a few months to a year ago. The stock market was flat for 2015: on average no net money was made. But recessions come from the collapse of credit markets and not the stock market. So-called "high yield" corporate credit has been troubled for a year as well. Heaven only knows what is going on with derivatives. The only thing sustaining banks have been consumer credit and that will go... south quickly in a down turn.

First we need to understand that "recession" is something that happens to the well-off. It is a temporary reset for the stock market. It is a weeding out of bogus credit. It is an excuse for politicians to give the rich more of what they want in structural reform to make government more plutocratic.

Many Americans have suffered not episodic recession but persistent depression. It has been going on for decades for some groups: unskilled net working capital class males in particular. Things get marginally better for them from time to time as the economy momentarily peaks; but then it is right back into the hole.

Our government sees them as marginally fluctuating demand for consumer discretionary spending, which affects - heaven help us - corporate profits and thus the returns to be made in capital markets. Government tells itself that it is only temporary and therefore not requiring of reform of the political economy. Only when depression become epidemic in the upper classes does political action precipitate.

Many of the structurally depressed don't fully understand their condition because they were born into it and have never known anything else. This is the case more and more as the decades of our government's "supply side" reaction to globalization and automation grinds on. These lost generations will likely never become fully assimilated into prosperity, should it ever return.