Corporations are basically form of social welfare for most people. In past there were less unproductive people attached.
I don't buy risk being shifted. Housing or gold is very conservative investment, and it had good returns.
Very true! Unfortunately, those people were almost literally left in the dirt, so of course we wanted society to provide them welfare... and we have all the issues of socialism and free riders. We need to separate welfare of people (which is natural to have free riders, but also necessary cost of a society to maintain itself) and employment/corps who shouldn't be filling the job of welfare providers.
[1] Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber
Returns of broad market index funds like SPY are not considered OK now? Am I living in an alternate reality?
I believe that in short and due time we'll find that much of those returns were 1) non-real due to inflation, 2) will crash back to historical means when we return to less strange monetary policies (such as non-zero interest, and selling at the end of QE), and possibly an effect from retirement/inheritances of baby boomers
Only time can know if I'll be right or not. I actually have a bit of a hypothesis that cryptocurrencies like BTC isn't actually productive right now, it's just wealth preserving and looks like it's "exploding" only because it's relative to a inflationary fiat currency.
now things in america will slowly correct, if employees / fmr employees can hold on to their new found power. but don't worry, a war is being fought in the background to strip workers of this new power. don't be surprised around mid-elections if new irs reporting laws are introduced, so the common man can be hemmed up for unpaid taxes on his new side hustles.
BUT bond yields and the like are result of gov policy and QE that aren't made to provide employers with risk aversion (directly, cheap credit is good for avoiding risk). They were made to address economic issues unrelated to employment. This required riskier investments to get 7+% yield, but its not companies doing the shift like other examples. I think a better way to prove your point was the transition from Pensions to 401k's since this dramatically changes the "save enough to retire" risk, while providing less risk to companies on funding employee retirements.
I've noted that there has been an increasing requirement for systemic risk to be absorbed by individuals in order to keep up in capitalism. For example once upon a time one could reasonably try and retire with Bonds as a major asset grouping. Later stocks were the minimum viable investment vehicle (more risk, for basic return), some might even say now inorder to get an ok return one needs to chase risk further with things like ARKK tech stocks and cryptocurrencies.
Similarly has been observed in employment. At one time, during strong unions, a lot of the risk was forced upon the employer -- for example defined benefit pensions, or disability benefits that might have seemed extreme by today's standards. Nowadays having a single employer is basically only slightly better than being a contractor, but pays much much less -- the livable compensation now requires much greater risk of being a contractor (from self insurance, contract stability, risk of not being paid etc).
Anyone else observed similar patterns?