The unemployment rate doesn't reflect the fact that people who used to earn a decent wage are now taking "survival jobs" for $10/hr.

"We didn't need tax cuts or jobs programs to come out of the last recession. Low rates alone did it"

I agree the low rates are likely the major stimulus for the 90's economy but government spending on Gulf 1 may have contributed to pulling the economy out of the toilet.

IMO the financial markets were also a major catalyst that stoked the fires of the 90's economy. People shifted slightly from consumption to investment and wealth was raked in from the nation's collective savings account and redistributed in a ponzi-esk fashion to dot com's and the like. A lot of the well paying jobs of the 90's were created from tech-bubble trickle-down.

According to the more fundamentalist of laissez-faire advocates, the financial markets are nothing more than a widely-based unco-ordinated market response - the collective outcome of individual judgements by countless actors in the free market, operating rationally to the ultimate good of the productive economy through the invisible hand. But others suspect that financial markets are more tightly linked and more prone to the herd instinct and the latest economic correctness than current theory would have it. Flights of capital can be abrupt, massive, and indifferent to their catastrophic impact on whole nations.

"The interconnection of financial markets, while promoting investment flows, also makes national economies vulnerable to major shocks and turbulence that call into question what participation in the global economy actually means. Leaders are stunned to see how 20 or 30 per cent of a country's economic value, built up over decades by the hard work and sacrifice of the nation, can be destroyed in a matter of weeks..."