The American economy, the largest and most dynamic in the world, is a geopolitical issue. And right now, it is in a predictable period of dysfunction. It’s been compared – rightly, in my opinion – to the tumult of the 1970s. Unemployment reached 8.2 percent in 1975, inflation rates hit 14.4 percent in 1980 and interest rates were 11.2 percent in 1979. I bought my first house in 1978 at 19 percent interest. It was a hard time, and it was intimately linked to the Vietnam War. Lyndon B. Johnson inherited that war and intensified it. The U.S. was facing … Continue reading Economies and War