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Comment by sharker8 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a meme about the current state of real estate prices. Which is that because banks became stricter about lending, it's not a bubble this time. The reason it can still be a bubble is that 1) ZIRP and 2) while governments somewhat achieved their mandate of low unemployment, employment stability (not having to constantly job hop to survive) is through the floor. That's why this is a structural megabubble IMO and isn't tracked very well with the proxy of 'how much debt is on individual balance sheets'.

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> ZIRP

The naive valuation of a stock that gives it an infinite value at a real 0% interest rate relies on an infinite horizon. Thankfully at least for residential loans it's difficult to get an interest-only mortgage -- in practice deposits and principal payments are binding constraints on valuations. Maybe that changes with corporate landlords becoming more prevalent, though.

> employment stability

This is interesting: high job turnover is usually seen as a sign of a healthy labour market because it can represent people sorting into jobs they're better suited for. I guess it's a question of what you hold constant: maybe people are changing jobs because jobs are plentiful. If people keep changing when jobs are hard to find things could get dicey.

The reason I and my colleagues are seemingly changing jobs often is because:

1) newJob pays more than oldJob

2) oldJob is becoming unstable, toxic, and will likely be firing us all in 6 months, so better to leave early and start the clock over

In a world where we remain at oldJob til the end, we risk 6 months of that extra pay differential, plus we now have to job hunt while technically not being employed

I think both points fit the "job market is healthy" description -- (1) explicitly has `newJob`, (2) implicitly assumes `newJob` in its faith in starting over. Conversely, if jobs were scarce it's plausible many of those changes wouldn't happen. Arguable in the case of "toxic" workplaces, though.

Bringing this back to shaker8's point about financial risks, I think these kinds of job changes mostly point to systemic resiliency, not fragility.

Interesting ideas. I suppose we can say the US job market is healthier than Spain's, because unemployment in the US is low, and the pay/expense ratio is good enough. In Spain, unemployment is very high, and the pay/expense ratio is not very good.

But imagine if the US job market changed to this scenario: still the pay is high, still the expenses are low, still the jobs are available, but you have to change jobs every week. That would signal two things:

1) Employers are suddenly finding it advantageous to rid themselves of workers on short notice

2) Time and money are being wasted interviewing people and onboarding them rather than letting them work for sustained periods

I think such a system, while still "healthy" because workers are still employed and paid similarly, is "less healthy" than a system where the workers can expect the duration of their work at one employer to be longer than 1 year

No, the pay/expense ratio is not good at a global level. The odds of making it to an 'early' retirement at age 60 at 50k per year and saving 20k are very low. The odds at 150k saving 50k are equally low. This is because the net worth required to move to passive income, due to ZIRP, has gone way up.

Based on these comments I believe everyone here is talking about the resiliency of the tech job market. I'm talking about the resiliency of the job market in the US, and the job market globally, what are sometimes called 'semi-skilled' jobs (a truly brutal term but hopefully that helps people get it). Even this doublespeak about talking about resiliency of markets implies a certain amount of dogma about how markets, not people, need to be resilient. If the market is resilient, it will somehow trickle down to ordinary folk.

agree but it’s not even just that.

it can just be a plain bubble even if everyone buying it has enough money to afford it. there’s been plenty of bubbles that didn’t involve leverage or loans at all. people simply got crazy and paid ridiculous amounts for assets far above intrinsic value. and when at some point something happens to the asset, it has a far way to fall.

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