U. S. Decline
The United States got pulled into the 21st Century Depression by many factors -- the biggest being the movement of international markets and the domestic political paralysis enabled by the power of 'big money.' One should be careful not to call it the movements of international capital as that suggests that individual capitalists were responsible. The players were largely corporate managers, central bankers and other entities like the Chinese Communist Party. While some historians attribute blame to the extended public sector and inflated costs resulting from collective bargaining, most historians now accept that this was a symptom of buying favoritism at the local and state-level while tax obligations were shifted from the present to the future {and default}. The changing perception of public-sector jobs from the lowest rung of the middle-class {1950-1970} to mid-level {1980-2000} and then to an inflationary excess {after 2008} mirrored and presaged the collapsing middle-class in the United States and parts of the European Union