> There are no major economic indicators flashing red.
High levels of corporate monopolization, high levels of stock buybacks, and low to no wage growth. They've been flashing for so long people don't even recognize them anymore.
High levels of corporate monopolization, high levels of stock buybacks, and low to no wage growth. They've been flashing for so long people don't even recognize them anymore.
None of the wage growth has kept up with inflation, for any quartile of workers.
Wages are still down 0.5 to 1.5 % from pre-Covid times adjusted for inflation.
Do you have a source for your claim that they aren't?
Pumping that much free energy into the economy cannot be undone with the simple wave of the austerity wand.
Yes, there was a small amount of money pumped into the consumer economy ($2000/household). Yes, there were some supply shocks during the height of the lockdowns.
No, those do not explain the persistent high prices.
Unprecedented consolidation across all sectors made it easy for a much smaller group of people at the top to respond to a zeitgeist that expected inflation by keeping prices high after the supply shocks were over, and pocketing the difference. It didn't even require active collusion (though it wouldn't surprise me if there was at least a little).
Covid caused us to print $13 - $16 trillion dollars.
That's more money than every war the US has ever participated in combined.
Yes
But the Elephant on the sofa is a deranged President threatening important trade partners
Duh!
Huh? There was "low to no wage growth" in the 80's and 90's. We do have wage growth now.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Wage growth for over 25 no-college earners has been even better.
> high levels of stock buybacks
There's nothing economically dire, or even weird, about choosing buybacks over dividends in returning profits to shareholders. It just lets shareholders choose when to sell instead of doing it for them.
Or is it primarily concentrated in the upper quintiles?
(I actually genuinely do not know the answer to this offhand.)
https://www.ibtimes.com/infographic-real-wages-production-no...
Which is "real average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees," and is the source of the graph that purports to show stagnation between 1973 and 2017 (it has in fact grown higher than 1973 since then).
Why that particular graph? Well, it excludes wages for "the bosses" and such, so perhaps it shows something more like the average person's experience. But also, I think it's cherry-picked because it shows a particularly grim view. For example, here's the real median household income chart instead:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
And you see that it's by no means stagnant.
If you want, you can find income by quintiles. In like the 90's and 2000's, the rise of inequality, top quintile earnings growth was much higher than bottom four. But that largely stopped in the 2010's and has actually reversed in the 2020's, with bottom quintile growth now the strongest.
Long story short: income is complicated, there are a lot of ways to dice everything. But if you look into the claim that "wages have stagnated," you will overwhelmingly see the "real average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees" data line. And regardless of how good or bad that particular choice of data is, it doesn't actually show stagnation -- it shows a big drop in the 70s and 80s, largely stagnant 90s, and then growth since then.