The analysis focusses on the market situations of the upper classes, the middle class, and some economically marginal groups, and attempts to answer the following questions: 1) Which groups and classes are most apt to bear the burden of unemployment, inflation and decreases in the rates of economic expansion? 2) What kinds of tensions and conflicts—and social resentments and hostilities—are apt to arise as a result of the differential distribution of the economic burden? What are likely to be the social and political responses—domestic and international—of the U.S. to a situation in which it can no longer assume an autonomous national economy?