Plentiful cheap labor, low energy and transportation costs and a generally peaceful era for geopolitics all helped turbocharge the globalization of supply chains and drive economic growth around the world in the decades after 1990. Whenever one of those pillars wobbled, there was cheap money to keep the party going, especially in the years after the 2008 financial crisis. The three major central banks—in the US, the euro zone and Japan—have kept their key interest rates below 5% since 2001. For most of the past 10 years, rates have been close to zero and certainly well below the rate of inflation.
