efederation and its entanglement with a more fully developed social welfaresystem]experienced a fuller recovery than Canada. Neither had a fullblown Golden Age. It was more likely a Tarnished Golden Age for the United States, and a Silver Age for Canada. The United States continued to have a serious deficit in trade, financed by imports ofcapital. That is, superiority in production of goods continued to slipaway. In the provision of certain computerized services, of course, theUnited State retained its lead. Canada continued to have high unemploymentand slow growth in productivity until late in the 1990s, and it continuedto rely to a significantextent on "commodity" exports, the prices of which continued to fall until1999. Real living standards in Canada fell over the 1990s. In 1997, the advance of Asia ended, temporarily, and a fairly deep recession set in. From an historical perspective, there was nothingunusual in this. The frontier of the expansion of industrialism hadalways experienced a boom and bust cycle. What happed in Asia wastypical. There was over expansion as the investment process itselfgenerated profits for projects that would never produce a profitonce the investment was in place. Gross inefficiencies and corruptiononce again characterized the boom period of capitalistic expansion.This became particularly evident in Thailand. Investment stopped, pulling down the value of the baht, the Thailand currency. This meantthat Thai debts could not be paid, and Thai markets collapsedThis affected sales and profits in Malaysia, where similar problems anda similar process occurred. Indeed, the "contagion" spread to most of Asiaoutside of China and India, to Russia, and it would have spread toBrazil, and then to the United States [perhaps], if the United Stateshad not rapidly increased its money supply, and consequently loweredthe rate of interest to allow support for debts in Brazil. The problemof trade imbalance in the United State...
