If you are in an industry that produces a good or service that is not dependent on rising asset prices, you are part of the Productive Economy. If you work for a bank, real estate broker, or financial services firm your income depends on interest on debt and rising asset prices, you work in the FIRE Economy. The FIRE Economy crowded out the Productive Economy from 1980 to 2008 by providing greater returns on capital invested in asset price inflation and interest on debt than investment in productive enterprise. However, with the crash of the housing and then the stock markets from 2006 to 2008, the FIRE Economy began to collapse. Unfortunately, the Productive Economy is not totally separate from the FIRE Economy but, as the diagram above shows, is enveloped by it. The collapse of the FIRE Economy is spilling over into what is left of the Productive Economy by reducing consumer and business access to all forms of credit, not only those that inflate asset prices within the FIRE Economy but those that fund normal business operations such as lines of credit and automobile loans.
The FIRE Economy in the US grew from 1980 to 2006, and began to disintegrate with the collapse of the housing bubble in 2006 followed in in early 2007 by the crash in the market for securitized debt that financed the housing bubble in the US, followed by the US banking system in 2008. A collapsing FIRE Economy is accompanied by debt deflation, falling demand, debt defaults, business failures, and rising unemployment. The Great Depression in the US in the 1930s is a famous example of a debt deflation that followed the collapse of a FIRE Economy. That debt deflation ended with WWII although it moderated from 1934 to 1938 by the economic reflation policies of the FDR administration, including a on time 69% dollar devaluation and numerous fiscal stimulus programs.
