With Globalization from the 80s onwards, the income from work (which in turn feeds consumption) in developed countries started going down, and on the consumer side that income shortfall was compensated by growing debt.

Then in 2008 the debt growth and hence Economic growth under that new model were jobs were outsourced, was stopped, hard, because too much debt had been accumulated and the Economy was becoming unable to service the interest on that debt (think about it: if $1000 are lent today and in a year’s time $1050 is due, to repay the principal plus interest, those $50 of interest have to be created as new wealth in the meanwhile. Now expand that to the whole Economy - more debt = more wealth has to be created to pay interest).

Central banks intervened by lowering interest rates to historically low levels (the so-called Zero Interest Rate Policy) supposedly temporary but not really, which in turn extended how much debt the whole Economy could stand without sinking under the weight of servicing the interest on it (lower interest rates = more debt for the same amount of interest needing servicing).

We’re running out of runway again, so what’s been hapenning is that, to maining profitability in an environment were all but a few are getting poorer (the ones getting richer are those will all that money which they lend, who have been receiving the interest for loaning money) companies are cutting on the cost side, so manpower, product quality and even trying to push consumers into new and more profitable models such as everything as a service.

This is just one side of the whole thing. There’s also a resource depletion side in that most of the easy and cheap stuff to extract - from minerals to oil - has long been extracted and that too goes against continued growth, which is another pressure on companies to keep profits growing by other means.