–“Will the economy bubble burst again in 2018 (like the one that happened in 2008)?”–
It is a virtual certainty that we will see some sort of massive correction even greater than the 2008 crisis, sometime between now and 2025. And at that time the states will need to bypass the financial system in order to put liquidity into consumer (citizen’s) hands, so that the economy can adapt to the shock. And governments are not yet ready to do this, although Americans can do it fastest. (And some of us are trying to make sure it happens this time around.)
Now, the reason this will be difficult, is that we have spent the entire postwar era financializing the economy, and done more so since the advent of petro-dollars, and more so to defeat world communism, and more so since the 2001 crash, and more so since the 2008 crash. (We could have paid off the vast majority of home mortgages in 2008 with the money we have spent SINCE 2008 trying to correct the economy. (Only Galbraith, me, and one other made this argument. Unfortunately, he was the only person of influence, and he died.) Imagine what that would have done to the economy.
Unfortunately, that ‘shock’ of de-financialization (ending rent seeking on consumer), will vastly diminish (a) the size of the financial sector (b) the rents that ‘institutional investors and pension funds’ can extract from consumers. So it will be a vast correction we have not seen in the world before.
Just WHY this is so is … well, non trivial. But it’s largely a factor of demographics, abilities of those demographics, and AVAILABLE consumption.
And, yes I can explain it in scary detail, but at present, it’s bedtime…..