We started the decade still surfing the crest of a long commodity/agriculture boom. Yet the economy was more unfit than it appeared. Today we are a leader in the fight for freer trade. In the 70s we reduced our involvement in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade because it didn’t suit a nation where we dug money out of the ground.

The Keating recession of the early 90s – and good policy in its aftermath – effectively killed inflation, just as Fed Secretary Paul Volcker had done in the US in the early 1980s. For the first time in decades, our economy was free of the structural imbalances inflation creates.

The 2000s were the era of the binge and the hangover. In the 2010s the world economy wanted to throw a recovery party but couldn’t get enough guests onto the dancefloor. Perpetual’s Matt Sherwood says the recovery from the GFC has been slowed by the three Ds – debt, disruptive technology and demography. The three Ds have made it hard to fuel global economic growth as savings rates have gone up and wage and profit growth has declined as a result.