@Tony Wikrent these disks? A quick search yields a fair number of instructions on how to dump QP into Excel, PDF, etc. Seems the original makers were Corel, who was bought out by Adobe. So if you go to adobe go to their Ottawa office (corels original home.)

#3
The first point to make is that labor costs were not rising that much. The textile, clothing, and shoe industries had been moved from New England to the old Confederate South beginning in the 1950s. When John Kennedy was a Senator from Massachusetts, he gave a long speech about this problem which is actually available on the tubes somewhere. As for the annual increase in labor costs themselves, a look at the Statistical Abstract will show that they were not out of historical line until 1977, when the rate on increase reached 8.0%. And in 1979, we get the first big union contract with givebacks -- the UAW contract with a bankrupt Chrysler. Negotiations began in July 1979 with Chrysler asking for a two-year freeze on wages and benefits, which the UAW immediately rejected by
the UAW. Agreement was reached in October 1970, with the UAW giving up $203 million in wages and benefits. See Concession Bargaining - The Kenneth M. Piper Lectures, by Thomas Miner, October 1983.

And actually, the attack to force down labor costs had begun in the early 1970s, in the construction industry. From Givebacks in a Deepening Crisis in Solidarity, August 2011:

Among the first to feel the effects were workers in the construction sector, starting in the 1970s. Employers formed early in the decade the Construction Industry Users Roundtable. Its strategy was to undermine the then powerful building trades unions by a new tactic called the “double breasted operation.” Simply put, this was a way to undermine the construction unions by setting up parallel, non-union companies.

The unions ignored the threat more or less, since the double-breasted operations were set up in the suburbs and outlying regions. The urban bastion of unionization in construction wasn’t immediately impacted. Employers progressively then moved jobs and work to the non-union operations.

The loss of jobs in the unionized operations eventually forced workers and unions to start granting concessions in an attempt to prevent their work shifting to the non-union companies. Concessions soon expanded. Saving jobs in exchange for givebacks on wages and benefits eventually became the norm.

So, if it's not rising labor costs, what was causing high inflation at the end of the 1970s? Well, what were the major world events of 1973? The Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War, followed by the Arab oil boycott, which drove oil prices from $3 a barrel to $12 a barrel world wide. Believe me, there was nothing else, especially labor costs, that came close to quadrupling in price over the entire decade, let alone over one single year.

OK, so maybe we can leave it there, and just blame the quadrupling in oil price in 1973-1974 for the high inflation at the end of the decade. Frankly, I completely forgot about it. And the reason why leads to my own personal story, and why what sticks in my mind is not the quadrupling in oil price, but the Eurodollars, petrodollars, and narcotics money. In the late 1980s to early 1990s, I was writing on capital goods industries: steel, autos, machine tools, railroad locomotives, farm and construction equipment, aircraft, etc. One thing I was doing was compiling statistics on mergers and acquisitions of industrial companies. The numbers were astonishing. (By the way, I think I have the data, and much other data, on about 4 or 5 old 3.5 inch floppy disks in QuattroPro files. I would dearly like to recover those data series. If anyone has the ability -- and willingness -- to read QuattroPro off old 3.5 inch floppy disks, please let me know!). At some point in the 1990s, the amount of money pouring into mergers and acquisitions exceeded the amount of money corporations spent on research and development, and a few years after that, the amount spent on new plant and equipment.

A larger and larger share of mergers and acquisitions was by leveraged buyouts (LBO). In October 1988, the largest LBO up to that point was initiated, of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts for the then staggering sum of $25 billion.

The obvious question was: where is all this money coming from? As we started to interview people and ask that very question, a picture of the dark side of all this began to emerge. I wrote a bit about this in May 2013 at TOP: Penny Pritzker as an example of the criminality of our elites.

So, the Reagan regime of deregulation was really a double whammy. It basically decriminalized the worst behavior of banks and corporations, at the very time that some of the most immoral, ruthless, indeed murderous, people in America were buying legitimacy for themselves and their heirs by seizing control, through brazen manipulation of debt and stock markets, of America's industrial companies.

The story of the hour is Penny Pritzker becoming Secretary of Commerce. So, tonight, you're going to learn about the Pritizker family and its fortune. I suspect that it's probably more than you want to know.

The origins of the Pritzker family fortune was her grandfather's mob connections when he was a tax attorney for a lot of people in "The Outfit," the Chicago mob, beginning under Al Capone, and continuing through the 1980s. This connection to organized crime was reportedly what financed the creation of Hyatt Hotels by Penny's father.

Yeah, that was a real can of worms we had opened. "Can of snakes" is probably more accurate. Now, one of the people I worked with was a real whiz with deriving meaning from things like the national income accounts and the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds reports. So another question comes up: if so much of mergers and acquisitions is dirty money, does any of this money show up in these national economic statistics.

Well, the answer is: they do and they don't. There is of course no line item for "fund inflows from narcotics cartels" or anything like that. But there are clearly some anomalies and unbalances that can probably best be explained by recognizing the presence of dirty money.

An interesting issue that arose was that the Fed, the Treasury, the Comptroller of the Currency, and other government entities had been grappling with these types of problems in the national economic statistics caused by the flows of Eurodollars and petrodollars. So, there was a substantial body of scholarship on the Eurodollar and petrodollar markets, and their effects on the economy. While the national economic statistics were not taking full account of Eurodollar and petrodollar flows, the body of scholarship provided numbers that could be backed out of the anomalies to give us some idea of how big the flows of dirty money were.

At the time we were doing all this -- the early 1990s -- the numbers the stats wizard had come up with indicated that dirty money alone was already one tenth the size of GDP. The Eurodollar market was at least five time bigger than that In June 2015, Marco Cipriani, a research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group, posted on Barry Ritholtz's site that "The average daily volume of Eurodollars borrowed overnight through the brokers in the past year was about $140 billion." That, uhh, works out to about $35 trillion a year -- TWICE the size of USA GDP!

The petrodollar market, of course, was launched soon after the Oil Embargo of 1973, but it was growing wildly by the time we were looking at it. The past 15 years or so, the oil producing countries have been running trade surpluses of around $1 trillion a year. According to Wikipedia, "Thanks to the historic oil price increases of 2003–2008, OPEC revenues approximated an unprecedented US$1 trillion per year in 2008 and 2011–2014.[2] Beyond the OPEC countries, substantial surpluses also accrued to Russia and Norway,[4] and sovereign wealth funds worldwide amassed US$7 trillion by 2014–2015."

The creation of the petrodollar market was actually a stroke of genius. All the money gushing out of USA to pay for oil, would come back as petrodollars buying national debt. From the standpoint of national economic accounts, there was balance. But not at the beginning: According to Henry C K Liu, in June 2008 Flat-earther blind to oil facts,

There was solid evidence that the 1970s recycling of petrodollars, which mostly ended up in the dollar assets in the United States anyway, contributed to US inflation as much as the higher retail price of gasoline. It in essence siphoned off additional global funds to purchase higher-priced oil for investment in US real estate, which was the only sector the then unsophisticated Arab money...

As the Saudis became more sophisticated in their deployment of petrodollars, the imbalances that might spur inflation appear to have been weakened.

Who, and how was this petrodollar system created? Bloomberg in May 2016 The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret described USA Treasury Secretary Bill Simon's secret trip to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in July 1974 to convince the Saudi regime to use their new gusher of dollars from quadrupled oil prices, to buy USA government debt.

I know I had read years ago about secret negotiations creating the petrodollar system, but could notremember exactly where. A link just mentioned the explosive 2004 book by John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and there it is on pages 100 to 104: "....Washington would offer the House of Saud an amazingly attractive deal: a commitment to provide total and unequivocal U.S. political and--if necessary--military support, thereby ensuring their continued existence as the rulers of their country."

What are we left with? We know that labor costs had already been knee-capped by 1979, so what does that leave us? We know that by the late 1970s, flows of Eurodollars and narcotics money are over half the size of USA GDP. At the same time, the USA industrial base is being asset stripped and shipped overseas. So, it's not just more money chasing the same amount of goods, it's much worse: you have more money chasing fewer goods.

(Let me repeat: I think I have the data, and much other data, on about 4 or 5 old 3.5 inch floppy disks in QuattroPro files. I would dearly like to recover those data series. If anyone has the ability -- and willingness -- to read QuattroPro off old 3.5 inch floppy disks, please let me know!)

@Tony Wikrent

but, as I've mentioned on this site before, this would be a multi-decade stimulus to the economy and the working- and middle-classes.

Imagine taking half our military budget here in the US, approximately $350 billion every year, and making it a nationwide jobs program transitioning our country to renewable energy in a sustainable way. Market it as defense of our nation (it really would be in so many ways), and transfer half our military folks into this new, civilian defense initiative. This would involve, over many years, doing the following:

--Developing a new, nationwide smart electrical grid that could reroute power to wherever needed even if multiple parts of the grid went down (through failure, terrorist attack, etc.). That itself would be an Apollo-style program, tapping our best minds and engineers in the country.

--Developing distributed renewable resources. Offshore wind up and down all our coasts (but relatively far out to sea so as to minimize effect on property values). Solar installations along state and federal highways, state and federal parking lots, and where possible, state and federal buildings. Offer government funded solar rooftop installations to people with lesser incomes for free, paid through this program. Let local companies do the work (solar installations, etc.) and boost local economies that way.

--Develop renewable energy storage solutions (batteries), which could also be a challenge for the brightest minds in our country.

--For the above initiatives, designate that a certain percentage of raw materials (aluminium, steel, solar panels, turbine blades, whatever) come from US companies. Even if it's 30%, it will serve as a boom to our manufacturing base. Cost can be higher than overseas (or Canadian) competitors, but only by a certain percentage to account for higher labor costs (or something along those lines).

--As the above projects mature, start projects to shut down coal mines and nuclear facilities safely, and clean up polluted areas and waterways.

--For half the military transferred into these areas, fund training for them, emphasize this is to make our country's energy system reliable, resilient, and safe for everyone. No longer will we need to be dependent on foreign oil, or dirty fracking. Hire an equal number of non-military civilians to provide good paying jobs to help execute the above programs.

Think big! Think multi-decade! At $350 billion per year, that's $7 trillion over 20 years, just in the USA. The benefits would be enormous!

Add on infrastructure support (rebuilding bridges, roads, etc.), add on another 10 years, and make it $10 trillion over 30 years.

#5
In November 2009, Mark Z. Jacobson, at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucchi, at the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Davis, had an article in Scientific American that surveyed what was required to end the era of burning fossil fuels. In 2011, they posted two pdf files providing heavily footnoted details of their 2009 Scientific American article; the pdfs provide all the details you could want, including discussion of critical material shortages, such as rare earth elements, for a mass, crash program.to stop global climate change and switch the world economy from its dependence on burning fossil fuels, to totally sustainable renewable energies, we need a crash program of $100 trillion in new construction of:

3.8 million 5-Mega-Watt wind turbines;
49,000 300-Mega-Watt concentrated solar plants;
40,000 300-Mega-Watt solar power plants;
1.7 billion 3-kilo-Watt rooftop photvoltaic (PV) systems;
5,350 100-Mega-Watt geothermal power plants;
270 new 1,300-Mega-Watt hydroelectric power plants;
720,000 0.75-Mega-Watt wave devices; and
490,000 1-Mega-Watt tidal turbines.

$100 trillion may sound like a lot of money. It really isn't. It's about how much is traded in three weeks in US financial markets: stocks, bonds, futures, options, and other derivatives.

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part II: Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies.