Despite all the economic dooming on social media, it actually looks like we might get a soft landing. And if so, Jerome Powell and the fed deserve a ton of praise.
White collar jobs like tech have been negatively impacted, but most other industries have seen significant wage gains [0]
All this "woe is I" layoff bullshit when millions of non-Techies might have been left on the streets when Covid hit, while we were happily working remotely and purchasing stocks or property.
I'm skeptical that you go from the lowest rates in history, over the longest period in history, to the fastest hikes in history...without some serious economic repercussions.
>significant wage gains.
Consumed by inflation, for the most part (but at least we kept pace). The average person isn't wealthier.
You don't feel it in SF/NYC/Boston/Seattle but that's also due to industry skew, and you absolutely feel the economic change in cities like ATL, Phoenix, Columbus, etc
In the tier 1 cities I mentioned, wages are growing much slower than the cost of living, but that isn't true for the rest of the country anymore.
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...
This is a conversation about America, not your country.
You only got 3% because you were not able or willing to find a buyer to give you more than 3%. Any other reason is just the buyer being polite.
Obviously, this works both ways too.
But who’s to say - maybe the rains do actually keep coming because we make all those sacrifices to the gods.
And until at least the 1980s the Fed did worse than the (broken!) system that they replaced.
See https://www.cato.org/policy-report/november/december-2012/ha... about the Fed.
On the positive side, Canada would have been an excellent role model to emulate, instead of coming up with the Fed system: https://www.cato.org/blog/there-was-no-place-canada
$SPX is at an all time high right now at $494. That's insane. I bought in at ~$360 in 2022.
Just buy when you have money, and liquidate your investment when you need money.
Citations:
https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/cleveland-fed-dist...
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4405350-telework-is-a...
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-remote-work-eric-a...
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/27/labor-shortages-air-traffic...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4531829-older-workers-propp... | https://archive.ph/sKeyE
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-...
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-wor...
https://www.businessinsider.com/baby-boomer-retirement-surge...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/21/american-workers-are-demandi...
Specifically, in what direction did New York roll back the policy?
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-remote-work-eric-a...
> Gov. Kathy Hochul said it has been a longer transition back to office work than anyone expected, as she too had predicted (if not demanded) a more robust return to work schedule. But now it sounds like she is opening up to the idea, whether she likes it or not.
> "I think the mayor is simply acknowledging the reality. We have a shortage of workers especially in government," Hochul said, adding that a more robust office pattern could still arrive down the line. "I believe all this is transitional, it does not have to be the death sentence in five days a week ever again, but we are not quite there yet."
All of the factors you've mention are in play in peer economies are managing things less well.
We would have enough bus drivers and train operators if we eliminated all bullshit white collar jobs.
900+ US school districts have moved to a four day week to retain teachers [1] [2], for example, because they have no other choice.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-districts-4-day-week-tea...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the...
Big fan of Graeber, agree there's lots of bullshit jobs.
Central planning is likely the wrong phrase, I just don't have something better cooked up at the moment to describe, "Should this job really exist? Is it creating value in some way? Or is it just existing for some other suboptimal purpose?" Clearly, the market itself is not allocating efficiently if bullshit jobs exist in such great number. What is the solution? I don't know.
My understanding is that there's a lot of historical evidence to suggest that central planning would do the opposite of better allocating resources. Besides, with US government spending at around a third of the GDP[0] now, plenty of that is going on, already.
For an individual Role, yes. for an economy, no, because you run into supply limitations.
But anyways, that isnt the question. The question is which jobs add value and how to structure an organization so that it is efficient and effective.
If your organization is crappy enough, you might not be able to get net value out of roles, even if you fill them.
>900+ US school districts have moved to a four day week to retain teachers [1] [2], for example, because they have no other choice.
From what I have seen in California Schools, there is more than enough money for teacher salary, but the grift and organization is the problem. State funding is ~ 23k per student, you have 30 students per class, or $700k/class. The average salary of public school teachers in 2021–22 for the State of California was $88,508.
Sounds like the problem is that people need three jobs to be comfortable.
The Fed is ignoring them and keeping rates high, because the economic-doomers are wrong.
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So economic doomers complain about inflation (which the Fed is trying to fix with high rates), but also want to pretend that unemployment is secretly 10x worse than it really is for some reason.
Personally I believe they kept rates far too low for far too long last time, deceived by the way the free money inflated assets rather than consumer prices, and that's a big part of what caused the recent inflation spike.
The recent bout of inflation is less about monetary policy than about the supply side, especially things like COVID and Ukraine causing supply disruptions. Those things have levelled out and begun to decrease.
I think its become clear that its a government problem, because if it was just a market problem, supply / demand would have leveled out by now.
It takes years to build any substantial housing.
Go talk to a builder. Land is ridiculously expensive due to speculation and labor is impossible to find due to it being a generally shitty job.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding about inflation. If inflation goes to 0%, housing costs will stay exactly where they are now. You are looking for a deflation in housing costs, where inflation is < 0%. We had that in 2008 and it caused...collateral damage.
The only real way to lower housing prices is to build a lot more housing. So yes, it's a government problem in that we don't let private actors build housing to meet the market's demand.
The fiscal side[0] is probably more to blame than the supply-chain restrictions. Aggregate demand was kept turbocharged since Covid through deficit spending. And given that the CPI is still 19.1% higher as of last reading compared to pre-pandemic times, whether or not the rate of change is falling, people are still rightly feeling squeezed.
What does this even mean, practically speaking? Their entire purpose is to always be considering lowering, maintaining or raising rates.
WSJ article on the pending "Doom Loop" https://archive.is/MOzr9