All those markets do feel a bit frothy, but if a global pandemic wasn’t enough to pop the bubble, I don’t know what would be.
The question is, if another event happens, will the fed stop the free fall? I bet yes because they only have one tool to address this problem.
Which means taking debt is low risk forever because the fed will always print money and save you the trouble of losing your money
(a bit like the subprime mortgage bubble but for corporate debt)
Those faulty and badly managed companies got even more free money injected and are even more addicted to near zero interest rates because of covid...
Now if inflation becomes to high for consumers the feds have to choose between consumers or once again rescueing those companies when setting interest rates. Neither will turn out good
It feels *weird*.
We would do a combination of both consuming less and developing new forms of what we do consume, especially over a 10-30 year term. I don't mean everyone wakes up anfndecides to care for the planet more than whatever they want to do today, I mean once something becomes expensive enough, we'll just stop doing it.
We've already done things just this year that would have sounded outlandish and impossible. But it eems in fact very little is actually impossible.
The largeness of the numbers doesn't really result in the kind of immovable inertia they imply, for a few different reasons.
1, The huge size of "everything that needs oil" is met by how equally large billions of people are organized into heirarchical structures with magic communication and coordination. Overnight 5 billion people can do something new.
2, All that collossal amount of oil-powered infrastructure is not actually all that long-lived. Ecerything from your toaster to the biggest steel plants to cargo ships to ...everything, it's all actually turning over all the time and nothing ever gets to be 50 years old, just from natural pressure of competition, obsolescense, and simple churn. That means it's really not that remarkable to imagine it all being changed into something else over the course of 30 years, instead of just newer versions of the same things.