2021 was such a bizarre year in so many ways. It feels like a post COVID fever dream in retrospect, and seeing that massive jump in job listings that year is a reminder of how weird it was.
My armchair macroeconomic take is Covid should have been an enormous financial depression but they flattened the curve and caused bubbles in some cases by printing so much money we’ll be paying the price for decades. It was certainly a huge reallocation/consolidation of wealth. I even think the somewhat untold story is just how much less well off a lot of Americans are. Like in my world, what I’ve seen amongst my access to HR data at a handful of large companies, the executive class (maybe VP and up) did great, the low/minimum wage class did great (labor shortage helped wages net of inflation), but there’s a huge mass of people in the middle that perhaps are only making 10% more than their 2019 wage right now after all the inflation. House prices ~doubled so unless they were already a homeowner acquiring one is basically impossible now, especially with rates were they are. They didn’t own much stock so largely did not participate in that either. It’s a different world and I think we can’t say for sure what will happen next.
Yeah, when people talk about the emptying of the middle class, I never really thought about it much till I saw it happen with COVID. You either made it out one end, or are sliding down to the other.
The market was so insane.
The job market and the capital markets are still insane. Unfortunately, I don’t think we reached the bottom yet given the astronomical real estate prices relative to incomes and high market valuations relative to earnings. Some signs of reality are starting like Real estate prices starting to fall in the Sunbelt of the US. The obvious commercial real estate bubble has not completely burst yet. So many markets are hanging like guillotine’s ready to drop. Markets have been buoyed by excess capital and rampant speculation by the wealthy for so long now; its shocking how long the charade has lasted.