Hey, remember back in 2009 or so when everyone was cheering that we were "out of" the Great Recession, but everyone not part of Wall Street was still bleeding? I feel like this might wind up being a reverse of that; and the reason for this is that most economic data are aggregates that are missing the whole picture.
GDP numbers are back up? Great - except that's just higher because the handful of companies that can really capitalize on 0% interest rates are doing so. Everyone else is still down from 2007.
Unemployment is falling? Great - except that those people are leaving the labor force or taking lower-wage jobs than they had before.
There's all sorts of ways that the headline numbers can hide the discontent of a large group of people under the rug. And likewise this can happen in the opposite direction. The economy as a whole can be screwed over in ways that happen to give small business owners or the working class more negotiating leverage or a greater share of the pie.
> Hey, remember back in 2009 or so when everyone was cheering that we were "out of" the Great Recession, but everyone not part of Wall Street was still bleeding?
I also remember the whole expansion preceding the Great Recession, during which the bottom three quintiles all did worse, the second-to-top was basically flat, and most of the gains were in a narrow segment at the top of the top quintile.
“Recession“ vs “expansion“ (multidimensional as it is) is still not, and not intended to be, the same as any individual person’s, or even the median person’s, experience of the economy.
GDP numbers are back up? Great - except that's just higher because the handful of companies that can really capitalize on 0% interest rates are doing so. Everyone else is still down from 2007.
Unemployment is falling? Great - except that those people are leaving the labor force or taking lower-wage jobs than they had before.
There's all sorts of ways that the headline numbers can hide the discontent of a large group of people under the rug. And likewise this can happen in the opposite direction. The economy as a whole can be screwed over in ways that happen to give small business owners or the working class more negotiating leverage or a greater share of the pie.