- Governments that shut down significant parts of every major economy, for several months, to contain the virus (which imho was a good reason), with
- Trillions in stimulus
- And a record global middle class that's never been larger or wealthier than today and wants to consume more than ever
And this is the result.
The free market has its flaws, but this situation is perfectly suited for capitalism to work its magic.
The middle class has been made wealthy by the government/Fed. The government is doling out cash at a furious pace.
Honestly, I have never seen the price mechanism function this badly in my investing career (10 years). And I studied economic history, and there are relatively few parallels to what the govt is doing now.
Whatever happens though, this isn't capitalism. Failure is the most important part of capitalism. The politics of today mean failure cannot occur.
Btw, to be specific, the stuff you are seeing in private equity (not just in the US but Europe) is just totally insane. Gambles that should have failed are returning 10x, money is being raised for non-productive purposes at 2% whilst you have consumers struggling for finance. The homeless situation in the US is intolerable. Some US cities are third-world, every bridge has people in tents underneath.
I can see why people think the system is working, it has made the already rich unimaginably richer...it isn't capitalism, it is an aristocracy. It is appalling that some people justify their theft by saying they deserve it (an unfortunate consequence of capitalism is that the winners feel justified).
The covid distributions were well known a couple months in.
The vulnerable actually needed more protection. Isolation, cleanse everything delivered from the outside.
The healthy cohorts should have continued as normal.
Of course, that's assuming the next pandemic isn't in 100 years when we forget everything we learned this time around.
Paradoxically, most of the big governments had plans in place for years, even decades, but they were not targeting the correct virus, and they had a hard time adapting to something unknown.
Next time, it will be different, and we should only be prepared to that.
How can we ethically get such a theory? Cancer. Tailor make a vaccine targetting the particular cancer cell a given patient has. If you give this as a hail-mary to those with a bad prognosis it becomes a win-win.
Larger population? Sure. Wealthier? Uh, no. By like no meaningful metric that I can think of.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
US middle class reacted to the pandemic by saving tons of money. At least, the ones who still kept their jobs (which was most people in fact. Yeah, Hotels / Hospitality / Restaurants / Airlines / Cruises did poorly, but that's still only one subset of the middle class).
Now that the US is leading the vaccinations in the world (at least, in the top 10 countries), and with more and more optimism coming about, people are looking to spend that money they saved.
Plus, on average, more literal money to spend, thanks to having nothing much to spend it on for the last year.
Yup.
> Computing, long distance travel, breadth and depth of entertainment choices, and disease
These have nothing to do with class, and I'm not even sure entertainment choices have gotten any better.