Barack Obama will deliver the most important speech of his presidency. With the US economy apparently on the brink of another recession and standard monetary and fiscal policies exhausted, has America, and indeed the Western world, run out of options?
Conventional wisdom maintains that the US, along with Britain and most of Europe, is now stuck in a "new normal" of high unemployment and economic stagnation, similar to the "lost decades" suffered by Japan since 1989. This dismal economic outlook is an inevitable consequence of the 2008 financial crisis and decades of debt-fuelled overindulgence.
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