Last week, the final numbers for '98 came in. America's families are borrowing to buy foreign goods. Historically, that has been the road to imperial decline. Now, the U.S. economy is showing the first symptoms of the global sickness. Our steel industry is drowning in imports.
Gasoline prices are at all-time lows, but U.S. oil dependency is now at a record high.
The loss of our economic independence is the price of our present policy. Yet even Al Gore showed at the global gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, that he knows there is no painless way out. The root cause of the global crisis is over-production. After the United States and IMF bailed out Mexico, huge quantities of capital poured into Asia for factories, plants and mines, creating a capacity to produce far more than the nations of the world had cash to consume. With prices falling, the countries that greedily gobbled up the capital cannot repay their debts.