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When Ian Fleming published Casino Royale in 1953, England had been thoroughly foofed in the b-nus by World War II. The country was completely broke, wartime sugar and meat rationing had continued for another decade and Great Britain's international power was slipping away in the wake of messy military entanglements in the Middle East and Syria, which totally doesn't sound like anything that's going on today.

Then James Bond suddenly appeared on bookshelves, a suave British sex dispenser of seemingly limitless resources and ability. Bond could afford to travel anywhere in the world, eat lobster like Cheeto dust, wield space-age fantasy gadgets and kill all of the Chinese Russians that were currently trying to take over the world using nothing but his ingenuity and witty retorts. The public loved him, and when Bond showed up on movie screens a decade later portrayed by Sean Connery's chest hair, he became an astonishingly accurate economic barometer for the next half-century.



"The name is Tits. Man Tits."

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When Dr. No came out in 1963, the economy was awesome, so the film just did OK. But over the next few years, a recession and the Vietnam War filled the country with the disenfranchised poor, and consequently the next three Bond films were the most successful of the entire series (adjusted for inflation). Appropriately, the most iconic Bond villain of the '60s is a fat, decadent shithead who covers everything in gold and is literally trying to steal all of America's money.