In Asia Times, Henry C K Liu begins his attack on the global economy with a potent observation: under traditional development and industrial economics, "income is all". Raising worker income is the final goal of economics. But under the post-industrial global economy, raising profits is the goal of economics:
Workers' income is the key factor in generating national wealth in a country
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In today's game of globalized international trade, the new operative rule is that "profit is all" and that high profit in competitive export trade requires low domestic wages
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This new rule of globalized trade is designed to produce short-term maximization of corporate profit for an export sector.
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This type of international trade incurs inevitable long-term stagnation in the domestic economies of all trading nations
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Stagnant wages everywhere in turn reduce aggregate global purchasing power needed for the expansion of international trade. It is a clear case of imbalanced economic sub-optimization.