One of the biggest structural changes to have occurred to the Australian economy over the past 35-years has been the explosive growth in the FIRE economy – Finance, Insurance and Rental, Hiring & Real Estate Services – which has roughly doubled its share of the national economy:
In short, since financial markets were deregulated in the mid-1980s, the FIRE sector has grown at roughly twice the pace of the rest of the economy, courtesy of the property bubble and associated explosion in household debt, as well as the rivers of gold from compulsory superannuation.
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