When the government can print money willy-nilly, it can finance any boondoggle it wants to. This free money would pull qualified people away from more productive endeavors. It makes sense that this trend would, over time, impoverish society and enrich those in Washington's orbit.
No, prices were super-high for more than a decade, before returning to let's say roughly double the pre-crisis price for the 90s, then spiking again.
Or regarding recent decades as normal, 1922-1972 was a window of steady low prices.
https://i.insider.com/58593c27ca7f0c20008b6b76?width=800&for...
If this was actually happening, we would see the impact in increasing labor prices, not stagnating labor prices.
And incomes of people near the top, in all fields, increased relative to the median too.
Yeah, that's a different argument. Its arguing that low-cost finance is crowding out savings. However, in this case if you look at the savings rate, its still a little too high relative to historical averages. Of course, 2020 is nuking all of the statistics. But prior to the COVID shock, both gross and personal savings were high and climbing despite constantly juicing the markets with cheap finance.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GSAVE
This is referring to the decades before 1970, not after the oil crisis.
> We've since had 50 years of stagnation in energy prices.
This is the period of 1970-2020. The price of oil has oscillated (jumping around, as you say) during this period, but the overall price of energy has not had a clear long-term trend.
The earlier poster's argument is that the stagnation in other metrics (from a period of impressive growth before 1970) may reflect this stagnation in energy prices (from a period of impressive reduction before 1970).