I truly wish people would see Biden for what he is: the anti-Trump. If you think of the American voters as the board of directors, and Biden as the CEO we hired after a thorough search, then we should come to realize he’s everything we needed to pull us out of a business slump: he’s not flashy or exciting, he doesn’t draw unnecessary attention to himself, and best of all, he’s extraordinarily competent. Meaning, he’s everything that Trump isn’t, and why we would give—or even consider giving—that clown show control of the country for four more years is beyond me.
This economy is great for everyone other than speculators (stock traders, real estate developers, VC/PE, banks, etc.) that require asset prices to be constantly going up. Having to invest in projects that can deliver a guaranteed delta over investing in US Treasuries is more difficult so they have to make better decisions on handing out capital. A lot of people were making big payouts on all the stupid shit that was done in the last 20 years or so, at the expense of normal people. Now, good companies are making profits and thriving. Bad companies that had been propped up for no good reason are going away. It's the way it should be. Good companies paying good wages, employing people in useful capacities rather than chasing pipe dreams. Hope we don't mess it up. I'm not going to feel bad for all the speculators that have to go back to working real jobs now. There are plenty of good jobs available for them.
What is the effect of the $2t deficit? The number is clearly in excess of what we have come to expect from our government.
Perhaps all of that spending swamped the negative effects of the Tech sector contraction. Perhaps the future effects of all of that spending are an explanation for why some people are uneasy about the economy.
"It has been frustrating watching the FOMC come around to eventually making the right decision, but all too often, they are late to the party: Late getting off of emergency footing, late to begin raising rates in response to surging inflation in 2021, late to see this was being driven by fiscal not monetary stimulus of the pandemic, late to recognize the FOMC itself is a driver of housing inflation, and finally, late to recognize inflation had peaked and reversed."
This is not even a little bit similar to my views. I think relative to history, the Fed has done a great job. They did allow some deflation during early COVID and were abut 9 months late with raising rates in '22, but the previous fed allowed a decade of too low inflation and unemployment
There's no "we" in the sense of a single Fed policy that will benefit every single American simultaneously.
Also, the people who take their cues from the Fed directly are in finance: securities brokers, investment bankers, venture capitalists, mutual fund and pension managers, and the like. They either have to shift money toward potential winners (conversely, away from potential losers) due to a policy action, or protect against losses if a shift isn't possible.
Workers or retirees can't do that. Like if tech is going to go into a secular slump because interest rates aren't near zero, a programmer can't easily go from the former hot sector (tech) to the next hot sector (say, EV batteries or clean power) because it would require retraining as well as competing with incumbent workers for available work.
I am almost certainly over-indexing because it's the industry I work in, but the consulting industry has also been acting like we are in a recession (or on the very precipice of a large one). Out of cycle layoffs, reduced raise and bonuses, etc. Which is weird because it seems separate enough form the tech industry highlighted above that if it is suffering from the same input issues, it's odd it stops just there.
I know it may be too small to consider its own industry on the scale of tech. But US Big-4 employs around the same number of corporate employees is "FANNG" does so it's also not a small group.
As I recall, those same consulting companies in 1999 hired anyone capable of writing a cover letter, by 2002 had fired them, and by 2005 were desperate to hire them back.
Perhaps the consulting industry's tendency to extrapolate & overshoot everything also applies to hiring!
Definitely agree with this. Also work for Big4 consulting and we way overfired at the beginning of the pandemic, then realized it was actually a boon for consulting, and then hired a slew of new consultants that just werent up to caliber. Now dealing with those ramifications now. Although the difference I would draw with tech is it does seem that the output (actual productivity) is taking a hit due to the quality
This may be the case, but internally, it's not just an oversupply issue. There are also stated project pipeline concerns too across various practices. That mean a bunch of other industries (not just tech in a feedback loop here), are worried enough about something or seeing something on their balance sheets that is making them less likely to hire professional services at the moment.
None of the value created by these companies was held by normal people -people who spend most of the money. Most of the revenue generated by these companies are just subscriptions that people forget they have and/or is difficult to cancel -or selling ads that no one looks at or hears.
Not clear that higher LFPR is the result of supply side reforms. Maybe it's just a supply response to better chances of getting a job if one enters the market. [Powell my be confuing a shift in a supply cured with a movement along it.]
You hit the nail on the head in the second half of the piece.
Firstly, crypto and VC are not very relevant to GDP so we can exclude those sectors.
Secondly, GDP is about production and consumption - so corporate revenues and employment/payrolls are key.
There were some layoffs and some SaaS firms had some revenue hits, but there was no real rolling recession in tech from a revenue point of view. This was essentially a revaluation of overpriced shares that had run up during the pandemic. Stock market corrections don’t seem to cause big recessions on their own (even big ones like the ‘87 crash and dot come bubble. In the latter case it was the crushing of telecoms companies, which was a classical case of over expansion and over spending, plus 9/11 that caused real harm rather than pets.com and that ilk).
As for the economy, we had a good quarter, following last year’s pattern of a slow first half followed by a good second half. Given the screwiness of Covid, consumer behaviors, distorted seasonal adjustments and divergence between GDP and GNI, I wouldn’t get too excited nor too negative about any one particular quarter. Today’s productivity numbers look especially screwy (did the whole economy really produce 5 pct more with the same inputs last quarter- extremely doubtful). I only spent time in a few states last quarter (so not a representative sample) but none of them felt materially different than during the much slower 2nd quarter- except for air travel.
If one delves into the BEA GDP report for Q3, there is also some less rosy news:
“Current-dollar personal income increased $199.5 billion in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $239.6 billion in the second quarter…..
….Disposable personal income increased $95.8 billion, or 1.9 percent, in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $296.5 billion, or 6.1 percent, in the second quarter. Real disposable personal income decreased 1.0 percent, in contrast to an increase of 3.5 percent.
Personal saving was $776.9 billion in the third quarter, compared with $1.04 trillion in the second quarter. The personal saving rate—personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income—was 3.8 percent in the third quarter, compared with 5.2 percent in the second quarter…..”
———
So growth in personal income and disposable personal income was actually less than in Q2, and real disposable personal income actually fell.
Personal spending increased because the savings rate fell. This could reflect consumer optimism or consumer weakness- too early to say.
Inflation feels like it is going to be very sticky. To get to a 2 pct level we need to see MoM numbers that are consistently 0.1 to 0.2 price increases. We are still running close to 0.3 MoM - much better than the 1970s-style late 2021 and 2022 data, but well above the alleged target. 3 pct inflation is not a crisis, but not great news.
Yes- long term good for innovation. And short term they do spend money on salaries, office space and kit, but in aggregate it usually doesn’t add up to much (though funding was a record $300 billion+ in 2021). If the startups burned through 1/3 of that in 2022 that isn’t chump change (almost equal to a year of GM’s sales), but that 2021 number was an anomaly.
"The carnage was widespread enough that it’s hard to pin on bad management."
I'd love your expanded thoughts on what "bad management" means. Nobody expected any exec to properly see and plan for Covid before it happened. I think the decision made during it and the assumptions made about the post-covid life are worthy of more examination.
The execs at basically every single tech company made big bets on where the economy and user behavior was going post-covid and they were utterly wrong. This actualized in terms of hiring, commercial investments, valuations in raising capital and more — an example that really stands out is SQ buying AfterPay for $29B, which is more than SQ is worth today.
Everyone else was doing it at the time, too. I get it. But isn't their job (and comp) built around seeing around those corners?
I'm not picking on Stripe as I have a ton of respect for em but if they raised at $100B and may not be able to get that in a public market for another 5-10 years ... isn't that a bad outcome regardless if the execs themselves aren't bad?
I'm not sure why we're decoupling the management's outcomes from their reputation or process. These are results-oriented businesses and many of they did bad.
My best guess is there really was no way to predict anything that happened on the way out of the pandemic either. All businesses had to prepare for a range of possible future demand patterns, and there was no way to predict which we'd end up with. Fed had a similar problem.
Way to be a fanboy. I have no idea how Tesla or SpaceX would have done under another specific manager nor under a manager of average ability. Neither do you. It's silly to pretend otherwise.
The whole secret to Elon Musk's success was and is that he is a charming financier.
His management style is exactly what you see at X/Twitter. With Tesla and SpaceX, those companies have to interact with regulators and he's going to find that he's not going to get the passes he got a decade ago.
"...It’s still running long after many said it would collapse" is grading Elmo on the Trump curve.
Walter Isaacson wrote an authorized biography. As reviewers and critics note of the Elon Musk biography, and any others of the authorized biography genre, is that we the reader don't really know what Isaacson traded for access.
1. Did Isaacson sign an NDA?
2. How much of the biography does Musk, his attorneys and minders get to control the narrative? This affects how much Isaacson is allowed to see. Also, did Isaacson have to turn over his notes and recordings to Musk after he was done? Did Musk and his minders get to review the book prepublication and dictate what can and cannot be printed?
3. What in the book is facts-as-it-happened, artistic license, and kayfabe? (I don't use the terms real and fake, since we cannot get an objective account of what had happened in the crafting of the biography.) Some could be fact, like Musk meeting with so and so at such time in such place. Authorized biographies, like pro wrestling, have kayfabe in common: We the reader see what is meant to be seen the way it is presented. We cannot see the negotiation and choreography of how the outcome unfolds, however.
"The Hunter Biden corruption story" is a foreign intelligence op presented as a "laptop" (which incidentally was filled with child porn, which is why nobody got to see it).
The rest of it was takedown requests for pictures of his penis.
Twitter doesn't appear that well run, although it's not much more broken than it was before. There is approximately no effort into stopping spam and you can regularly look at a post with "100 quote tweets" and find none of them load.
Anecdotally, hiring at FAANG and other large companies seems to be going back up. A lot of companies that had tough layoffs and now we're hiring again. 🤷♂️
Two explanations:
• The layoffs were were driven by a desire to boost short term shareholder value rather than long term business justifications, then people came to their senses, and realized they laid off too many people.
• The layoffs were a way for tech companies to pivot -- lay off people in one part of the business and double down on another.
The Big Tech Wreck, like the 2008 Financial Crisis, sadly offered unprecedented investment clarity. One person’s bust is another person’s boom. In the wake of the Financial Crisis, investors could purchase corporate bonds of the companies the government had to backstop for $0.50 on the dollar, paying anywhere from 8.5%-12% (a Milliken junk-bond Renaissance). The March Pandemic Panic created a latent Big Tech Wreck. (For my sibling, I purchased AMZN @$82.52, a 125% discount to AMZN’s all-time high.) Investors who thought AMZN would return to that all-time High we’re all-in. Three pillars: AWS, logistics, advertising. AMZN made cuts and significant changes in all areas. One example is logistics. Note SHOP recently signed on with AMZN.
One can’t overlook the SPAC Mania. An estimated 85% of newly created SPACs are either underwater or couldn’t find a date and returned money to investors. There is a common denominator among the SPACs that survived. Indeed, investors are comparing them to “successful” legacy companies that have ridden the wave of the same widget for too long. Ingrained corporate culture is a slow death. Remember when IBM and INTL were the only game in town. These start-ups’ radically different widgets (e.g., ASML) put the legacy companies in dire straits. Li-ion “jelly roll” batteries have remained the same since the 90s. Startups with radically new battery designs (silicon anodes, solid state) will grow much faster in value than the legacy battery manufacturers.
One true thing about technology: it always improves or radically reinvents itself.
I really want to "like" this comment but I can't tell if you are very funny or deeply paranoid. A \S at the end(for sarcasm) might help people to decide.
I truly wish people would see Biden for what he is: the anti-Trump. If you think of the American voters as the board of directors, and Biden as the CEO we hired after a thorough search, then we should come to realize he’s everything we needed to pull us out of a business slump: he’s not flashy or exciting, he doesn’t draw unnecessary attention to himself, and best of all, he’s extraordinarily competent. Meaning, he’s everything that Trump isn’t, and why we would give—or even consider giving—that clown show control of the country for four more years is beyond me.
This economy is great for everyone other than speculators (stock traders, real estate developers, VC/PE, banks, etc.) that require asset prices to be constantly going up. Having to invest in projects that can deliver a guaranteed delta over investing in US Treasuries is more difficult so they have to make better decisions on handing out capital. A lot of people were making big payouts on all the stupid shit that was done in the last 20 years or so, at the expense of normal people. Now, good companies are making profits and thriving. Bad companies that had been propped up for no good reason are going away. It's the way it should be. Good companies paying good wages, employing people in useful capacities rather than chasing pipe dreams. Hope we don't mess it up. I'm not going to feel bad for all the speculators that have to go back to working real jobs now. There are plenty of good jobs available for them.
What is the effect of the $2t deficit? The number is clearly in excess of what we have come to expect from our government.
Perhaps all of that spending swamped the negative effects of the Tech sector contraction. Perhaps the future effects of all of that spending are an explanation for why some people are uneasy about the economy.
The inflation effects are whatever the Fed allows them to be. The Fed cannot offset the effect of deficits on long run growth,
Barry Ritholtz wrote something to this effect yesterday in "The Fed is Finished*".
https://ritholtz.com/2023/11/the-fed-is-finished/
"It has been frustrating watching the FOMC come around to eventually making the right decision, but all too often, they are late to the party: Late getting off of emergency footing, late to begin raising rates in response to surging inflation in 2021, late to see this was being driven by fiscal not monetary stimulus of the pandemic, late to recognize the FOMC itself is a driver of housing inflation, and finally, late to recognize inflation had peaked and reversed."
This is not even a little bit similar to my views. I think relative to history, the Fed has done a great job. They did allow some deflation during early COVID and were abut 9 months late with raising rates in '22, but the previous fed allowed a decade of too low inflation and unemployment
And they were early post financial crisis with years of slow growth as a a result. We don’t know which is better long term.
I know! :)
There's no "we" in the sense of a single Fed policy that will benefit every single American simultaneously.
Also, the people who take their cues from the Fed directly are in finance: securities brokers, investment bankers, venture capitalists, mutual fund and pension managers, and the like. They either have to shift money toward potential winners (conversely, away from potential losers) due to a policy action, or protect against losses if a shift isn't possible.
Workers or retirees can't do that. Like if tech is going to go into a secular slump because interest rates aren't near zero, a programmer can't easily go from the former hot sector (tech) to the next hot sector (say, EV batteries or clean power) because it would require retraining as well as competing with incumbent workers for available work.
Tell that to the politicians who can't be bothered to raise taxes an reduce the deficit.
I am almost certainly over-indexing because it's the industry I work in, but the consulting industry has also been acting like we are in a recession (or on the very precipice of a large one). Out of cycle layoffs, reduced raise and bonuses, etc. Which is weird because it seems separate enough form the tech industry highlighted above that if it is suffering from the same input issues, it's odd it stops just there.
I know it may be too small to consider its own industry on the scale of tech. But US Big-4 employs around the same number of corporate employees is "FANNG" does so it's also not a small group.
As I recall, those same consulting companies in 1999 hired anyone capable of writing a cover letter, by 2002 had fired them, and by 2005 were desperate to hire them back.
Perhaps the consulting industry's tendency to extrapolate & overshoot everything also applies to hiring!
Anyone capable of writing a cover letter? Sounds like good jobs for ChatGpt.
(I assume you were joking. Great verbal flourish!)
Definitely agree with this. Also work for Big4 consulting and we way overfired at the beginning of the pandemic, then realized it was actually a boon for consulting, and then hired a slew of new consultants that just werent up to caliber. Now dealing with those ramifications now. Although the difference I would draw with tech is it does seem that the output (actual productivity) is taking a hit due to the quality
This may be the case, but internally, it's not just an oversupply issue. There are also stated project pipeline concerns too across various practices. That mean a bunch of other industries (not just tech in a feedback loop here), are worried enough about something or seeing something on their balance sheets that is making them less likely to hire professional services at the moment.
Oh definitely no doubt about that one!
And the 2001 Dot Com Bubble recession, for comparison..?
Part of that was over investment in real telecom infrastructure.
None of the value created by these companies was held by normal people -people who spend most of the money. Most of the revenue generated by these companies are just subscriptions that people forget they have and/or is difficult to cancel -or selling ads that no one looks at or hears.
And what about the Inflation Reduction Act inspiring many millions of dollars of investment and creating thousands of construction jobs?
It depends on the ROR of those investments v the investment that were not made because of the higher interest rates.
Hey Noah - for your next post, can you write about “supply side impact on GDP”
Chairman Powell spoke about the impact that increased supply side reforms had on the 4.9% GDP blowout number ( larger workforce for example).
This seems like a major validation of the economic writings of yourself, Ezra, DThompson etc.
Thought it deserved a double click.
Not clear that higher LFPR is the result of supply side reforms. Maybe it's just a supply response to better chances of getting a job if one enters the market. [Powell my be confuing a shift in a supply cured with a movement along it.]
Great idea!
You hit the nail on the head in the second half of the piece.
Firstly, crypto and VC are not very relevant to GDP so we can exclude those sectors.
Secondly, GDP is about production and consumption - so corporate revenues and employment/payrolls are key.
There were some layoffs and some SaaS firms had some revenue hits, but there was no real rolling recession in tech from a revenue point of view. This was essentially a revaluation of overpriced shares that had run up during the pandemic. Stock market corrections don’t seem to cause big recessions on their own (even big ones like the ‘87 crash and dot come bubble. In the latter case it was the crushing of telecoms companies, which was a classical case of over expansion and over spending, plus 9/11 that caused real harm rather than pets.com and that ilk).
As for the economy, we had a good quarter, following last year’s pattern of a slow first half followed by a good second half. Given the screwiness of Covid, consumer behaviors, distorted seasonal adjustments and divergence between GDP and GNI, I wouldn’t get too excited nor too negative about any one particular quarter. Today’s productivity numbers look especially screwy (did the whole economy really produce 5 pct more with the same inputs last quarter- extremely doubtful). I only spent time in a few states last quarter (so not a representative sample) but none of them felt materially different than during the much slower 2nd quarter- except for air travel.
If one delves into the BEA GDP report for Q3, there is also some less rosy news:
“Current-dollar personal income increased $199.5 billion in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $239.6 billion in the second quarter…..
….Disposable personal income increased $95.8 billion, or 1.9 percent, in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $296.5 billion, or 6.1 percent, in the second quarter. Real disposable personal income decreased 1.0 percent, in contrast to an increase of 3.5 percent.
Personal saving was $776.9 billion in the third quarter, compared with $1.04 trillion in the second quarter. The personal saving rate—personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income—was 3.8 percent in the third quarter, compared with 5.2 percent in the second quarter…..”
———
So growth in personal income and disposable personal income was actually less than in Q2, and real disposable personal income actually fell.
Personal spending increased because the savings rate fell. This could reflect consumer optimism or consumer weakness- too early to say.
Inflation feels like it is going to be very sticky. To get to a 2 pct level we need to see MoM numbers that are consistently 0.1 to 0.2 price increases. We are still running close to 0.3 MoM - much better than the 1970s-style late 2021 and 2022 data, but well above the alleged target. 3 pct inflation is not a crisis, but not great news.
I would have said VC is relevant to GDP, but with a delay of 10-15 years. But that still leaves us where you suggest: no effect now.
Yes- long term good for innovation. And short term they do spend money on salaries, office space and kit, but in aggregate it usually doesn’t add up to much (though funding was a record $300 billion+ in 2021). If the startups burned through 1/3 of that in 2022 that isn’t chump change (almost equal to a year of GM’s sales), but that 2021 number was an anomaly.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture-capital-amount-invested-in-the-united-states-since-1995/
"The carnage was widespread enough that it’s hard to pin on bad management."
I'd love your expanded thoughts on what "bad management" means. Nobody expected any exec to properly see and plan for Covid before it happened. I think the decision made during it and the assumptions made about the post-covid life are worthy of more examination.
The execs at basically every single tech company made big bets on where the economy and user behavior was going post-covid and they were utterly wrong. This actualized in terms of hiring, commercial investments, valuations in raising capital and more — an example that really stands out is SQ buying AfterPay for $29B, which is more than SQ is worth today.
Everyone else was doing it at the time, too. I get it. But isn't their job (and comp) built around seeing around those corners?
I'm not picking on Stripe as I have a ton of respect for em but if they raised at $100B and may not be able to get that in a public market for another 5-10 years ... isn't that a bad outcome regardless if the execs themselves aren't bad?
I'm not sure why we're decoupling the management's outcomes from their reputation or process. These are results-oriented businesses and many of they did bad.
My best guess is there really was no way to predict anything that happened on the way out of the pandemic either. All businesses had to prepare for a range of possible future demand patterns, and there was no way to predict which we'd end up with. Fed had a similar problem.
Elon Musk = bad management. He's going to be a case study in it, and in a dark way Elmo would like that.
Way to be a fanboy. I have no idea how Tesla or SpaceX would have done under another specific manager nor under a manager of average ability. Neither do you. It's silly to pretend otherwise.
The whole secret to Elon Musk's success was and is that he is a charming financier.
His management style is exactly what you see at X/Twitter. With Tesla and SpaceX, those companies have to interact with regulators and he's going to find that he's not going to get the passes he got a decade ago.
"...It’s still running long after many said it would collapse" is grading Elmo on the Trump curve.
Walter Isaacson wrote an authorized biography. As reviewers and critics note of the Elon Musk biography, and any others of the authorized biography genre, is that we the reader don't really know what Isaacson traded for access.
1. Did Isaacson sign an NDA?
2. How much of the biography does Musk, his attorneys and minders get to control the narrative? This affects how much Isaacson is allowed to see. Also, did Isaacson have to turn over his notes and recordings to Musk after he was done? Did Musk and his minders get to review the book prepublication and dictate what can and cannot be printed?
3. What in the book is facts-as-it-happened, artistic license, and kayfabe? (I don't use the terms real and fake, since we cannot get an objective account of what had happened in the crafting of the biography.) Some could be fact, like Musk meeting with so and so at such time in such place. Authorized biographies, like pro wrestling, have kayfabe in common: We the reader see what is meant to be seen the way it is presented. We cannot see the negotiation and choreography of how the outcome unfolds, however.
"The Hunter Biden corruption story" is a foreign intelligence op presented as a "laptop" (which incidentally was filled with child porn, which is why nobody got to see it).
The rest of it was takedown requests for pictures of his penis.
Twitter doesn't appear that well run, although it's not much more broken than it was before. There is approximately no effort into stopping spam and you can regularly look at a post with "100 quote tweets" and find none of them load.
Amazing analysis and eloquently written, like you will not read anywhere else.
Anecdotally, hiring at FAANG and other large companies seems to be going back up. A lot of companies that had tough layoffs and now we're hiring again. 🤷♂️
Two explanations:
• The layoffs were were driven by a desire to boost short term shareholder value rather than long term business justifications, then people came to their senses, and realized they laid off too many people.
• The layoffs were a way for tech companies to pivot -- lay off people in one part of the business and double down on another.
Spend more time with people like David Sacks and you might get an even crazier ideas. Sorry 🤷♂️
The Big Tech Wreck, like the 2008 Financial Crisis, sadly offered unprecedented investment clarity. One person’s bust is another person’s boom. In the wake of the Financial Crisis, investors could purchase corporate bonds of the companies the government had to backstop for $0.50 on the dollar, paying anywhere from 8.5%-12% (a Milliken junk-bond Renaissance). The March Pandemic Panic created a latent Big Tech Wreck. (For my sibling, I purchased AMZN @$82.52, a 125% discount to AMZN’s all-time high.) Investors who thought AMZN would return to that all-time High we’re all-in. Three pillars: AWS, logistics, advertising. AMZN made cuts and significant changes in all areas. One example is logistics. Note SHOP recently signed on with AMZN.
One can’t overlook the SPAC Mania. An estimated 85% of newly created SPACs are either underwater or couldn’t find a date and returned money to investors. There is a common denominator among the SPACs that survived. Indeed, investors are comparing them to “successful” legacy companies that have ridden the wave of the same widget for too long. Ingrained corporate culture is a slow death. Remember when IBM and INTL were the only game in town. These start-ups’ radically different widgets (e.g., ASML) put the legacy companies in dire straits. Li-ion “jelly roll” batteries have remained the same since the 90s. Startups with radically new battery designs (silicon anodes, solid state) will grow much faster in value than the legacy battery manufacturers.
One true thing about technology: it always improves or radically reinvents itself.
Interesting Take... my take is a bit simpler
1) years of outrageously low interest rates
2) A lot of good AND bad ideas got funded.
3) The good ideas are driving productivity growth
4) The bad ideas are getting washed out...
5) In the era of hyper compitiion for talent, rich companies over hired...now they are right sizing.
6) The banking sector, which never learns its lession, is in the process of readjusting to new rates.
Where are we landing... a pretty good place:
1) Unemployment low and wages rising
2) Despite wages rising, inflation dampening.
3) Why? Productivity is rising.
We will look back at this period like the 50s... and perhaps the next "greatest generation" ...
Noah, did you make sure your AI startup investments aren't going to destroy humanity?
If it turns out that's how you've been spending our subscription fees, I swear I'll drag you until the moment the lights go out.
I really want to "like" this comment but I can't tell if you are very funny or deeply paranoid. A \S at the end(for sarcasm) might help people to decide.