Posting this as its own top level comment for better visibility:
Look at how (relatively) low it was in September 2007. One can assume in February it was even lower - and February is when Greenspan said a recession was obviously coming. The subprime mortgage crisis started in April 2007. But the job market didn't really get fucked until 2008. There's a delay with these types of things - I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse. That's when you see the spike in unemployment, not now.
Because the ad-fueled tech sector companies are driving employment? And which of these companies are fueled by immense amounts of debt (traditionally a mainstay of capital intensive industries, which tech is not).
I don't know, your comment makes little sense to me. I encourage others to read what Greenspan actually said if they are under the impression that he predicted the 2008 recession.
People may read causality into your comment that you didn't imply. That the number of unemployed persons per job opening is so low is a very strong "boom" signal. Busts inevitably follow booms, but booms don't cause busts. Something else is the trigger. Subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, the rate tightening caused by inflation in 2022, etc.
I argue that the US fed rate is going to have to get a lot higher than 4% to cause this boom to bust in the US. That's an exercise in fed tea leaf reading. The last fed guidance was a lot more ambiguous than previous tightenings this year.
> I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse.
I think this will unfold quicker than that. We’ve had artificially low interest rates (+ QE) for over a decade now. There’s lots and lots of economic activity that will not be profitable when rates go up. If we’ll have ~5% rates in February (as Powell indicates) then I think we’ll see massive deterioration in the labor market before summer.
"We’ve had artificially low interest rates (+ QE) for over a decade now."
No, you misunderstand the situation. We had artificially high interest rates for at least the period from late 2008 to about 2014 -- if we assume the Taylor Rule is "the natural rate", as Taylor originally defined it in 1993, as the rate that allows the maximum possible employment balanced with just 2% inflation. For most of the period 2008-2014, that would have implied a rate of negative 5% interest, but banks cannot go much below 0%, so they were up against the zero lower bound, and so the rate was artificially high -- it was stuck at 0% when the economy needed it to fall to negative 5%, so as the restore what maximum employment could be achieved against the limit of 2% inflation.
And massive political pressure on the Fed, again. During the trump years they seemed to buckle under the pressure. With social media and our current political atmosphere I don't see this continuing if people start feeling the pain through job losses. I certainly won't stand for it.
Frankly, I'm tired of the interest rate hammer falling on workers. I find it especially unacceptable when the Fed is jacking rates to reign in wild corporate spending and investor speculation.
Again, everyone has been begging congress for better tools but they choose inaction until the Fed is forced to use the one tool they have.
I see this round as the Fed quickly trying to get things under control when they have safe harbor with Biden. Given a Trump/Republican administration again I expect the gloves to come off when they demand cheap debt for the investor class under the guise of helping workers. Magically, the Republicans know how to fix the economy (until it explodes and it's Binden's fault), or so goes the trope.
> I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse.
That is likely the wrong prediction.
The thing to be worried about is stuff like commercial real estate and all the vacancies in places like downtown SF and Portland (plus Mall vacancies and everything else--other than self-storage of course).
Those vacancies are currently being floated on cheap debt and rolling that over is going to get much more expensive. But it takes time to push a business into insolvency, so the delay you cite is certainly real.
That can rollover into a financial crisis via CMBS.
I doubt that this recession will be primarily about tech, although it might hit tech harder than 2008 did. I doubt it changes anything fundamentally about the tech sector though other than clearing out some unsustainable companies with high debt-to-equity ratios.
I disagree. There is a ton of VC dry powder right now. Many are waiting for 'the bottom' to happen before pulling the trigger on more investments and big rounds. As soon as things level out, you'll see a flood of money in. I think it's unlikely rates will continue to rise for an entire year.
Rates don't have to rise any more to cause a recession. Holding rates at this level should be more than enough. And Powell has indicates that they're going to go higher than expected and likely hold it there longer than the street expects.
You should really listen to him rather than your own ideas about what the CPI is going to do.
>The subprime mortgage crisis started in April 2007. But the job market didn't really get fucked until 2008.
The job market didn't just magically "get fucked". Companies found themselves with little cash and no access to credit. We had the biggest credit freeze since the Great Depression. The Fed is not making that mistake again, and the corporate world is absolutely loaded with cash right now.
So my understanding of GFC is 2008 unemployment situation was caused by collapse of corporate debt (due to banks being caught in subprime loan crisis with their pants down) which in turn fed further banking collapse so we had a negative feedback loop. I don’t see a cycle like that today
Recessions never look like the one before it, because that's what everyone expects to happen and plans for.
This one is already quite odd in a number of ways (i.e., low unemployment), so there's good reason to expect several other aspects of it to not follow conventional wisdom.
My personal opinion is that this will be seen as an indefinite recession, in that we will look back and see that it was comprised of the cause and effect of many smaller "recessionary events" rather than one defining event.
Normally, the stock market is a leading indicator. It is down 20% bit from all time highs but still has a bit to go even to get down to where we were pre-pandemic.
Also, since the recession is being created by rate hikes, there will be plenty of room to cut rates in a recession/deflationary environment. It seems that there could be a natural feedback loop to this.
Remember that the government doesn't count people who are not looking for work (perhaps because they've given up hope of ever finding a job, for example) as "unemployed".
So the actual number of people who are not working is certainly higher.
This is a myth. The government publishes multiple unemployment rates (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm) along with the "official" headline rate. You probably want the U-4 or U-5 rate. In reality, all of the rates are highly correlated and what's important is the rate relative to historical norms.
When the headline unemployment rate is the only thing the vast majority of people hear about and what politicians boast about, it's entirely reasonable to remind people that it's common to misunderstand what "unemployment rate" actually means.
Most people do think it's something closer in relation to labor participation rate.
Yes, you can discover the more useful number of how many people in working condition do not have a job. It's not hidden or anything. But that number is not the unemployment rate.
That means the graph on the article uses the less useful number. And the GP's notice is relevant.
Sure. But the press will report the absolute numbers when and in whatever way it benefits each publication's political wing. This is done under terms like "unemployment rate" which every reasonable person takes to mean that it includes _all_ unemployed people. So sure, the government bureaucracy is correctly doing its bureaucratic job but politicians, press, and pundits abuse the complicated data by presenting it in deceptively vague terms.
Oppositely, I suspect they do count fake (or unfillable) job openings that employers post for a variety of reasons (needed formally for internal promotions to the need to say you're hiring in order to say you're growing to bureaucracies confused about they're aims etc).
They have been saying that for like 20 years just to make some politician look bad.
Reality is that after two years no one can really get back in the same job without some sort of bridge trainings for any job. So yes they are still looking. Just not necessarily the same type of job.
As an extreme, the pipeline of Hollywood movie production is an interesting model for working with “the best” people. Most positions aren’t that exclusive, but finding the right people is actually a major concern.
The media doesn't normally latch on to metrics that include people not looking for work as they look for the cheap and easy soundbites, but the government counts them. There are many measures of unemployment to account for all the different ways you might want to look at things. Why wouldn't they maintain multiple measures of unemployment? It is obviously something that cannot be summed up in a single figure.
The media (almost) always uses U-3. It's the agreed upon value. The others exist and get updated at the same time, but for most purposes U-3 is good enough. The other values generally track along with U-3, they really only matter when that correlation breaks (ie, it's good to check them, but you only mention them when there's something interesting with them specifically).
The far better number to look at is the "Quit Rate"[0][1] - the number of people leaving their jobs for other jobs. It's more reflective of what's actually happening because job openings is often an inflated number that doesn't reflect the number of jobs actually available.
I think, with the rise of the gig economy, the number of unemployed persons is not a very good metric anymore, because it doesn't make a distinction between a full-time employee, a shift worker getting 20 hours per week, and an Uber driver working at a loss, if you count the car depreciation.
A better metric could be the number of billable work hours within the last month, or the payroll distribution curve. The latter can be easily computed from the monthly payroll taxes and should show if people are being massively shifted to part-time or laid off and not immediately finding another job.
> an Uber driver working at a loss, if you count the car depreciation
I hate to nitpick but I see this sentiment word-for-word on HN way too much. Uber drivers don't actually operate at a loss unless they only Uber for a short amount of time and they total their car during that stint. They just tend to earn less profit (often way less) than they think they are earning due to the car depreciation and other factors. But a working class person cannot afford to operate "at a loss" without noticing immediately, and a $25,000 car cannot depreciate infinitely.
Interesting. I must say, that doesn't look like we're currently in a recession.
On the other hand, if the job market is actually that tight, you'd expect employees to have pricing power. (Maybe they do, and it's just taking both workers and management a while to get used to that idea?)
The reason why there's a debate is that by some measures, we're in a recession, but by other measures, we're not. Jobs is extremely strong. From a jobs perspective, we are not in a recession.
And so cues the debate. Which measures _should_ we focus on? Etc. etc.
The only thing with any certainty, is that I know we'll be retroactively be declared to have been in a recession for months. The NBER is 100% trusted on calling the recession, but they're also always late to the party by several months.
NBER always calls the recession accurately, because they backdate their calls. Ex: in 2008, NBER declared that we've been a recession since 2007.
--------
Because of this effect, everyone wants to be "correct faster than NBER", so you see a whole lot of talking-heads talking about recession way too early (ie: before all the economic indicators prove we're in a recession). Everyone wants to predict the future after all, so that they can feel smarter about the whole situation.
EDIT: It should be noted that in the real world, it takes weeks, maybe months, to collect and process the statistics. That is to say, we won't know how good our economy in October 2022 is, until maybe January of 2023. That's why NBER is late, they need the time to collect statistics and analyze them. But its also why everyone who is trying to call the Recession "as it happens" (IE: call a January Recession in January) is inevitably going to be wrong, because they're baseless and without any actual data backing that sentiment.
Data and statistics take time. Many months. Just sit tight and wait. Have patience. There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession. Getting the call correct is important. It takes many months to spin up employees and/or fire them anyway (good severance pay is multi-month affair after all)
> There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession.
Isn't there a large financial benfit?
Like if you could predict any up/down turns you know when to start buying/shorting stocks. Or even if you're a bank maybe don't lend out a ton of money at say 2% when next month you can lend at 5%.
>>There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession.
For people interested in understanding exactly what the economy does in detail, of course it is more important to get it right than getting it early.
However, for some sets of short-medium-term investors, there could be a very real benefit to calling the trend correctly and early.
I'm quite convinced that what is happening here is what happens to every complex system after a large uncontrolled disturbance - all the subsystems oscillate wildly and often not with the same leading/following indicators. This is just that happening until it gets damped.
I see a key real-time recession indicator as just the level of traffic in the area (I'm north of Boston). Obviously not hard numbers, but quiet vs dense & fast traffic seems to indicate better whether we're going into recession or not. The traffic has only increased since the beginning of the year, and indeed, the last quarter came out as 2%+ growth...
These are the hallmarks of an industrialization. Labor is needed to be more productive. Business wants capital to do it. Lack of labor and productivity results in supply shortages that raise prices, while labor shortages forces salaries to match.
Stocks, looking for dividends, will do poorly because of high pay, labor costs will eat profits and eaten profits will kill stock values, leaving to the appearance of recession.
Individuals will barely scrape by neutral because inflation offsets higher pay
But a good investment that raises productivity will pay very very handsomely in the future.
And those that don't? Will be inflated away to nothing.
Order is being restored to the post 2008 insanity. Many tech companies won't survive the jump.
The high rates are not being driven by firms competing for capital, they are being driven by the Fed reducing the money supply and associated expectations of money supply reduction because of high inflation.
> On the other hand, if the job market is actually that tight, you'd expect employees to have pricing power. (Maybe they do, and it's just taking both workers and management a while to get used to that idea?)
Is it not the case in your area that every fast food joint and small business has a "hiring" sign up with a starting wage listed that a lot higher than it was ~3 years ago?
Look at how (relatively) low it was in September 2007. One can assume in February it was even lower - and February is when Greenspan said a recession was obviously coming. The subprime mortgage crisis started in April 2007. But the job market didn't really get fucked until 2008. There's a delay with these types of things - I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse. That's when you see the spike in unemployment, not now.
Yeah, you have to account for that. Everywhere there's a huge shortage of jobs paying at or below $20/hr. Likely caused by most of those people moving up to jobs in the 25-30/hr range.
And then they reversed in 2019 when the stock market started slowing down and Trump freaked out and pressured them to keep the unsustainable growth going, leaving us collectively in a weaker position to respond to the covid crisis.
Because, we have a supply recession, not a demand recession. We haven't had one in living memory (except, kind of, the oil supply shocks in the 70's), so we don't seem to recognize it. Some people think it obviously feels like a recession is happening, but others point to things like this graph to say that it sure doesn't look like it.
But that's because this measures demand for labor, not supply. We are seeing a broad-based depression of economic activity, caused by supply problems, and the supply of labor is one of those problems. We've aged, a lot of boomers retired a bit early at the onset of the pandemic, and there are a lot more people on disability than we once had. The labor force participation rate has never returned to pre-pandemic levels, and even that was low by 21st century standards:
Ominously, most of what world governments have been doing to try to help the economy, has been about goosing demand. In a supply recession, that's like giving an electric blanket and a hot drink to somebody with a dangerously high fever...
The analysis I've seen always has supply crashing (lock-downs, which are over) then recovering and in the case of manufacturing, being higher than even before the pandemic. Inflation should have mostly stopped if that was all there was to it (or never happened because demand would go down too when people can't get paid). However demand crashed less, recovered more, and has kept right on going up way above per-pandemic levels and faster than the increasing supply.
Manufacturing moving "back home" is how we are attempting to deal with the supply shocks, so it is true that domestic demand is increasing but I expect the parent considered that as part of the supply shock. This doesn't necessarily suggest a demand shock on the global scale. Places like China are seeing decline in exports.
Stimulus packages may have goosed demand but low interest rates should in theory* increase supply, since capital must be applied to useful purposes rather than sitting in a bank collecting interest.
*unfortunately, subsidizing ride shares is probably not a "useful purpose"
"Supply recession" is a shortage of people willing to produce meaningful stuff for the going price. Majority of Gen Z wanting to become CEOs, youtubers and luxury bloggers is very indicative of that. We kinda plugged the hole by letting China produce cheap trinkets, Saudis pump cheap oil and Russia get cheap gas, but it only kept working as long as that money came back to the West through various laundering schemes.
Except now that Russia and China are showing military ambition, this arrangement is done with, so we truly need more domestic supply. Except now it's a cultural problem: if you give 10 youtubers and 1 baker one extra dollar, the price of bread will go up, but it won't convince a single youtuber to go stand in front of a hot oven all day. We won't fix it by printing more money. We could fix it by destroying easier ways to make money, but it will be painful and will take time.
Automation fixes the oven problem, and we've been doing it in the US for a long time in applications where low cost of energy in the US allowed.
But thinking we're going to bring lots of jobs for $5 an hour so they can try to afford $3000 of rent per month is just going to get cities burned down in mass.
>We've aged, a lot of boomers retired a bit early at the onset of the pandemic, and there are a lot more people on disability than we once had. The labor force participation rate has never returned to pre-pandemic levels
And more than a million Americans have died from Covid.
One thing to always remember is that companies (especially startups) have strong incentives to always have a lot of job openings on their websites. Because it looks like the company is doing great. Also, there is no legal obligation to actually hire someone. So it is almost a zero risk move.
Readit News
Look at how (relatively) low it was in September 2007. One can assume in February it was even lower - and February is when Greenspan said a recession was obviously coming. The subprime mortgage crisis started in April 2007. But the job market didn't really get fucked until 2008. There's a delay with these types of things - I personally predict that a year from now, a lot of companies (especially ones in the tech sector fueled by immense amounts of cheap debt and the assumption ad revenue always goes up) will collapse. That's when you see the spike in unemployment, not now.
I don't know, your comment makes little sense to me. I encourage others to read what Greenspan actually said if they are under the impression that he predicted the 2008 recession.
I argue that the US fed rate is going to have to get a lot higher than 4% to cause this boom to bust in the US. That's an exercise in fed tea leaf reading. The last fed guidance was a lot more ambiguous than previous tightenings this year.
I think this will unfold quicker than that. We’ve had artificially low interest rates (+ QE) for over a decade now. There’s lots and lots of economic activity that will not be profitable when rates go up. If we’ll have ~5% rates in February (as Powell indicates) then I think we’ll see massive deterioration in the labor market before summer.
No, you misunderstand the situation. We had artificially high interest rates for at least the period from late 2008 to about 2014 -- if we assume the Taylor Rule is "the natural rate", as Taylor originally defined it in 1993, as the rate that allows the maximum possible employment balanced with just 2% inflation. For most of the period 2008-2014, that would have implied a rate of negative 5% interest, but banks cannot go much below 0%, so they were up against the zero lower bound, and so the rate was artificially high -- it was stuck at 0% when the economy needed it to fall to negative 5%, so as the restore what maximum employment could be achieved against the limit of 2% inflation.
(Taylor himself later modified the Taylor Rule in response to feedback from Republicans, a story you can grasp from this: https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/12/on-the-definition-of-... )
Frankly, I'm tired of the interest rate hammer falling on workers. I find it especially unacceptable when the Fed is jacking rates to reign in wild corporate spending and investor speculation.
Again, everyone has been begging congress for better tools but they choose inaction until the Fed is forced to use the one tool they have.
I see this round as the Fed quickly trying to get things under control when they have safe harbor with Biden. Given a Trump/Republican administration again I expect the gloves to come off when they demand cheap debt for the investor class under the guise of helping workers. Magically, the Republicans know how to fix the economy (until it explodes and it's Binden's fault), or so goes the trope.
That is likely the wrong prediction.
The thing to be worried about is stuff like commercial real estate and all the vacancies in places like downtown SF and Portland (plus Mall vacancies and everything else--other than self-storage of course).
Those vacancies are currently being floated on cheap debt and rolling that over is going to get much more expensive. But it takes time to push a business into insolvency, so the delay you cite is certainly real.
That can rollover into a financial crisis via CMBS.
I doubt that this recession will be primarily about tech, although it might hit tech harder than 2008 did. I doubt it changes anything fundamentally about the tech sector though other than clearing out some unsustainable companies with high debt-to-equity ratios.
Where do you get this idea from? Especially since the Fed has said over and over that they are going to do exactly that.
You should really listen to him rather than your own ideas about what the CPI is going to do.
The job market didn't just magically "get fucked". Companies found themselves with little cash and no access to credit. We had the biggest credit freeze since the Great Depression. The Fed is not making that mistake again, and the corporate world is absolutely loaded with cash right now.
...Is it? Or is it loaded with debt masquerading as cash?
This one is already quite odd in a number of ways (i.e., low unemployment), so there's good reason to expect several other aspects of it to not follow conventional wisdom.
My personal opinion is that this will be seen as an indefinite recession, in that we will look back and see that it was comprised of the cause and effect of many smaller "recessionary events" rather than one defining event.
Also, since the recession is being created by rate hikes, there will be plenty of room to cut rates in a recession/deflationary environment. It seems that there could be a natural feedback loop to this.
So the actual number of people who are not working is certainly higher.
When the headline unemployment rate is the only thing the vast majority of people hear about and what politicians boast about, it's entirely reasonable to remind people that it's common to misunderstand what "unemployment rate" actually means.
Most people do think it's something closer in relation to labor participation rate.
That means the graph on the article uses the less useful number. And the GP's notice is relevant.
https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Vx5b
Dead Comment
Reality is that after two years no one can really get back in the same job without some sort of bridge trainings for any job. So yes they are still looking. Just not necessarily the same type of job.
As an extreme, the pipeline of Hollywood movie production is an interesting model for working with “the best” people. Most positions aren’t that exclusive, but finding the right people is actually a major concern.
Dead Comment
Aha, it's not Universal "have £16,000 or less in money, savings and investments".
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm
[1] - https://www.statista.com/chart/26186/number-of-people-quitti...
A better metric could be the number of billable work hours within the last month, or the payroll distribution curve. The latter can be easily computed from the monthly payroll taxes and should show if people are being massively shifted to part-time or laid off and not immediately finding another job.
I hate to nitpick but I see this sentiment word-for-word on HN way too much. Uber drivers don't actually operate at a loss unless they only Uber for a short amount of time and they total their car during that stint. They just tend to earn less profit (often way less) than they think they are earning due to the car depreciation and other factors. But a working class person cannot afford to operate "at a loss" without noticing immediately, and a $25,000 car cannot depreciate infinitely.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
> U6 adds on those workers who are part-time purely for economic reasons
On the other hand, if the job market is actually that tight, you'd expect employees to have pricing power. (Maybe they do, and it's just taking both workers and management a while to get used to that idea?)
And so cues the debate. Which measures _should_ we focus on? Etc. etc.
The only thing with any certainty, is that I know we'll be retroactively be declared to have been in a recession for months. The NBER is 100% trusted on calling the recession, but they're also always late to the party by several months.
NBER always calls the recession accurately, because they backdate their calls. Ex: in 2008, NBER declared that we've been a recession since 2007.
--------
Because of this effect, everyone wants to be "correct faster than NBER", so you see a whole lot of talking-heads talking about recession way too early (ie: before all the economic indicators prove we're in a recession). Everyone wants to predict the future after all, so that they can feel smarter about the whole situation.
EDIT: It should be noted that in the real world, it takes weeks, maybe months, to collect and process the statistics. That is to say, we won't know how good our economy in October 2022 is, until maybe January of 2023. That's why NBER is late, they need the time to collect statistics and analyze them. But its also why everyone who is trying to call the Recession "as it happens" (IE: call a January Recession in January) is inevitably going to be wrong, because they're baseless and without any actual data backing that sentiment.
Data and statistics take time. Many months. Just sit tight and wait. Have patience. There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession. Getting the call correct is important. It takes many months to spin up employees and/or fire them anyway (good severance pay is multi-month affair after all)
Isn't there a large financial benfit?
Like if you could predict any up/down turns you know when to start buying/shorting stocks. Or even if you're a bank maybe don't lend out a ton of money at say 2% when next month you can lend at 5%.
For people interested in understanding exactly what the economy does in detail, of course it is more important to get it right than getting it early.
However, for some sets of short-medium-term investors, there could be a very real benefit to calling the trend correctly and early.
I'm quite convinced that what is happening here is what happens to every complex system after a large uncontrolled disturbance - all the subsystems oscillate wildly and often not with the same leading/following indicators. This is just that happening until it gets damped.
I see a key real-time recession indicator as just the level of traffic in the area (I'm north of Boston). Obviously not hard numbers, but quiet vs dense & fast traffic seems to indicate better whether we're going into recession or not. The traffic has only increased since the beginning of the year, and indeed, the last quarter came out as 2%+ growth...
First, the NBER is not a government agency. It's a private organization.
Second, there is no law that says that the NBER has the legal authority to declare recessions.
Low unemployment.
High inflation.
High interest rates.
These are the hallmarks of an industrialization. Labor is needed to be more productive. Business wants capital to do it. Lack of labor and productivity results in supply shortages that raise prices, while labor shortages forces salaries to match.
Stocks, looking for dividends, will do poorly because of high pay, labor costs will eat profits and eaten profits will kill stock values, leaving to the appearance of recession.
Individuals will barely scrape by neutral because inflation offsets higher pay
But a good investment that raises productivity will pay very very handsomely in the future.
And those that don't? Will be inflated away to nothing.
Order is being restored to the post 2008 insanity. Many tech companies won't survive the jump.
Not if they are selling the type of labor that is experiencing increase in prices, because:
>Lack of labor and productivity results in supply shortages that raise prices, while labor shortages forces salaries to match.
Your entire story is backwards.
Is it not the case in your area that every fast food joint and small business has a "hiring" sign up with a starting wage listed that a lot higher than it was ~3 years ago?
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/what-are-leading-la...
The labor market tends to be tightest before a recession because it forces the Fed to hike until it breaks.
https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
QT + higher interest rates clearly started in 2015.
QT quite clearly did not start in any meaningful way in 2015.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL
But that's because this measures demand for labor, not supply. We are seeing a broad-based depression of economic activity, caused by supply problems, and the supply of labor is one of those problems. We've aged, a lot of boomers retired a bit early at the onset of the pandemic, and there are a lot more people on disability than we once had. The labor force participation rate has never returned to pre-pandemic levels, and even that was low by 21st century standards:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Ominously, most of what world governments have been doing to try to help the economy, has been about goosing demand. In a supply recession, that's like giving an electric blanket and a hot drink to somebody with a dangerously high fever...
It is exceedingly obvious to anyone looking at the trends that there is a simultaneous demand and supply shock going on.
*unfortunately, subsidizing ride shares is probably not a "useful purpose"
Except now that Russia and China are showing military ambition, this arrangement is done with, so we truly need more domestic supply. Except now it's a cultural problem: if you give 10 youtubers and 1 baker one extra dollar, the price of bread will go up, but it won't convince a single youtuber to go stand in front of a hot oven all day. We won't fix it by printing more money. We could fix it by destroying easier ways to make money, but it will be painful and will take time.
But thinking we're going to bring lots of jobs for $5 an hour so they can try to afford $3000 of rent per month is just going to get cities burned down in mass.
And more than a million Americans have died from Covid.
Because otherwise, that explains nothing about the chart.