Recent growth is a debt fueled mirage

Most measured global economic growth in recent decades is an artifact of credit expansion rather than genuine output gains: Booth's The Price of Tomorrow (2020) argues it took roughly $185 trillion of new global debt to produce roughly $46 trillion of global growth (figures as stated in the book, covering approximately 2000–2018), and that growth would likely have been negative without that stimulus — a "Ponzi economy" in the book's framing.

Nuance: The debt and GDP figures are the book's own aggregation and drift with time; they should be quoted as Booth's numbers with the book's 2020 vantage point, not as independently verified statistics. The underlying facts — global debt has grown faster than global GDP for decades — are broadly accepted; the contested move is the causal reading. Critics note that debt-to-GDP comparisons mix stocks with flows, that much debt finances assets rather than consumption, and that productivity and demographics also drive growth. Proponents (including Dalio's debt-cycle work, which Booth draws on) argue the direction of the imbalance matters more than the precise ratio. Booth's own position is stronger than most debt-cycle analysts': he holds that a reset is likely already unavoidable.

Common misstatements: "It takes $4 of debt to create $1 of growth, permanently" (the ratio is a period-specific aggregate, not a constant). "All growth since 2008 is fake" (the book's claim is that growth was credit-assisted and overstated, not that no real output gains occurred).