If you want to discuss how structural changes in the economy have let capital fuck over labor, that's a different conversation. That trend has been going on since before I was born, though, and the takeaway I learned from it, before even entering the workforce, was "Build capital."
And like I said, your citation doesn't take I to account increases in CPI.
Real wage growth is falling. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickwwatson/2018/09/25/real-...
It doesn't matter if they're getting more Uncle Sam Fun Bucks, if those Fun Bucks are worth less than they gained.
> If you want to discuss how structural changes in the economy have let capital fuck over labor, that's a different conversation.
Nah, they're pretty related.
> That trend has been going on since before I was born, though, and the takeaway I learned from it, before even entering the workforce, was "Build capital."
It's next to impossible to build capital if you're not being paid a living wage to start with, and your real wage growth is negative.
Interest rates are a bit worrisome - historically the Fed has a tendency to overshoot and cause a recession, and do so 2-3 years after the rate hikes go through. If they didn't hike at all, we'd end up with the mother of all bubbles, though.
To learc83's point - the last time I can remember when people didn't think a recession was imminent was 1998-2000, when everybody was talking about the "New Economy" and how profits didn't matter anymore and insane stock valuations would be justified by productivity increases going forward. That was a helluva bubble. Then from 2001-2003 we actually were in recession, 2004-2007 smart money was predicting the coming CDO/housing/hedge fund crash, 2008-2009 the crash happened, 2010-2011 everyone was talking about a double-dip, 2011-2014 was the "jobless recovery" and talk about how the sectors that were destroyed in 2009 were permanently dead and tech was the one bright spot in the economy, 2014-2015 was the seed funding/delivery startup/sharing economy bubble, 2015-2016 was a tech slowdown as that bubble popped, and 2017-2018 was all about how Trump was about to ruin the economy (hasn't happened yet, who knows about later?). In the process, we've had bubbles in dot-coms, housing, derivatives, hedge funds, Web 2.0 startups, mobile apps, accelerators, delivery startups, West Coast real estate, and cryptocurrencies, all of which have amounted to a large transfer of wealth from those who followed the news to those who make the news.
[1] https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker.aspx?pan...
[2] http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/national-e...
[3] https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506