QE is and was another prop to keep things afloat. Again, the biggest clue to how fragile Western economies are is the absurdly low interest rates. Britain's went to an all-time low last year, after 7 years of being stuck at the previous all-time low. That's the tell because the Bank of England's been around since the 1690s.

GDP is an easily manipulated measure, so too inflation rates which are directly linked to the former when making the equation. The USA's data is a joke. Their inflation number doesn't include fluctuations in food and energy prices (which everyone must consume). Here it's based on CPI when it used to be RPI. RPI is nearly always higher, and more accurate, because changes to housing costs are included which most people have to bear.

Getting back to the Yanks, their headline unemployment rate is 4.7%, and yet 94 million (from a 324 million total population) of their fit and able citizens of working age are not in work. If they totted-up the total in the same way as they did until 1985 that headline rate today would stand at 23% - just 2% lower than what it stood at during the Great Depression.