The Great Deleveraging: Economic Growth and Investing Strategies for the Future

Introduction

This book addresses why the United States took on so much debt and, eventually, how the debt will be reduced—delevered—and the costs of that deleveraging. In between, it differentiates sources of real economic and financial market growth from those that hinder and undermine them. It also provides some perspective on asset class returns over the last nine decades and some insight into the foundation of past secular bear and bull markets. That perspective is meant to better frame some basic rules of the investment road and hopefully make for more effective future navigation in an increasingly shifting global economy and more diverse market environment. First, the book starts with a reminder of a time when the outlook seemed pretty ...