Later Career
In the mid-1970s, Janeway warned that a credit crunch in farming regions of the U.S. might lead to an agricultural depression. To some extent he anticipated the credit crunch of the mid-1980s, which resulted in the savings and loan industry's troubles throughout farm country. Janeway also anticipated the widespread advent of two-income families when, in 1976, he said that "single-paycheck families are doomed. They don't have a fighting chance. They're like a patient without an oxygen tent, an appendicitis victim without penicillin."
During the 1970s, in personal appearances and in his newspaper columns in more than a dozen newspapers, Janeway warned that "housing prices and interest rates will go through the roof" and that the stock market was heading for a collapse. In late 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had peaked above 1,000 a year earlier, fell to 577. Janeway appeared on TV talk shows and on lecture tours, reportedly receiving as much as five thousand dollars a speech. He wrote eight books and articles for many publications that included Newsweek, Barron's, Commonweal and the New York Times.
In 1989 Janeway published his final book, The Economics of Chaos. This book once again reflected the influence of the 1940s mobilization model on Janeway's thinking, as he called for mobilizing the country's hidden assets. Janeway arrived at diverse reform strategies by a reconsideration of U.S. economic history from Alexander Hamilton to Ronald Reagan. He proposed swapping U.S. food exports for oil imports, and demanded somewhat protectionst "reciprocity" in trade, whereby importers who penetrated more than 25 percent of a U.S. domestic market would be required to invest in American assets or buy U.S. products.
In The Economics of Chaos Janeway urged the United States Treasury Department to invest Social Security and other government trust funds more aggressively to generate greater benefits. Such improved benefits, Janeway argued, would coax millions of workers in the underground economy to pay their taxes in order to receive the better returns of government-sponsored programs. Janeway's proposal to invest Social Security funds more aggressively anticipated present-day calls to privatize Social Security trust funds and invest them more aggressively in the stock market.
Janeway had other maverick proposals to halt the flight of workers and cash into the vast underground economy, which he called a three-ring circus consisting of growing numbers of people working off the books, the bustling Eurodollar market and the illegal drug trade. After The Economics of Chaos was published, Janeway's health declined and he suffered from diabetes and heart problems. He died on February 8, 1993 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan at the age of 80.
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