The economy is a subject that will glaze the eyes of most. Well, unglaze those eyes and read these.

The Economic Limits of the Empire

With the conquest of Iraq, the American Empire stands at its zenith. U.S. military supremacy is unchallenged. U.S. technological superiority is now taken as a given -- even by the Japanese. America’s most formidable enemy, the Soviet Union, is more than a decade in its grave. Our most likely future adversary, China, is several decades away from posing a threat to American global hegemony.

Even the French have been cowed into a sullen silence. The U.N. Security Council (the last bastion of French hopes for a "multi-polar" world) has placed its good housekeeping seal of approval on a unilateral, open-ended U.S. occupation of Iraq -- a colonial "mandate" in all but name.

As the neocons turn their attention to remaining members of the "Axis of Evil," the New American Century never looked so near at hand.

But a proverbial cloud – this one quite a bit bigger than a man’s hand – sits on the horizon. I’m not talking about the terrorists. Al Qaeda may still lurks in the weeds, wounded but dangerous. In imperial terms, however, bin Laden is just a nuisance -- and in some ways a useful one, given that anti-terrorism has become the rallying flag for an assertive, even aggressive, American foreign policy.

The threat I’m talking about is economic. Like the British Empire in the years after World War I, the American Empire is marching toward global domination on increasingly shaky financial legs:
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Deflation
by William Greider

At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little, I am going to describe the economic situation in plain English. The United States is flirting with a low-grade depression, one that may last for years unless the government takes decisive action to overcome it. This would most likely be depression with a small d, not the financial collapse and "grapes of wrath" devastation Americans experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the potential consequences, especially for the less affluent and the young, would be severe enough--a long interlude of sputtering stagnation, years of tepid growth and stubbornly high unemployment, punctuated occasionally with a renewed recession. Depression means an economy that is stuck in a ditch and cannot get out, unable to regain its normal energies for expansion. Japan, second-largest economy in the world, has been in this condition for roughly twelve years, following the collapse of its own financial bubble. If the same fate has befallen the United States, the globalized economy is imperiled, too, since America's market for imports and its huge trade deficits keep the global trading system afloat.
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