High interest rates are certainly erasing some forms of irrational allocation that can’t be sustained under them (e.g. all the crypto stuff), but the collusion between firms on things like return to office, wage suppression, and price gouging is largely independent of them.

You keep talking about collusion. Do you have any supporting data to back this up?

What if it’s not a decision made in a smoky back room behind closed doors but rather monkey-see-monkey-do/“hey we can get away with it”?

Definitely is weird to say the least. Even small companies often have HUGE investment firms behind them of course.

This is exactly what you would have said the last time there was proven collusion. It takes a while for the proof to come out, but as the sibling comment says: it's awfully convenient that all the RTO policies and layoff ratios are in alignment.

Every FAANG simultaneously decided they needed to layoff roughly the same percentage of workers, and even more through return to office, with no justification or demonstrated impact on profits, productivity etc, they share large investors, and oh, yes, they all got busted for colluding in the past? It’s all pretty much out there in the open.

Not to mention they're immediately hiring to replace those workers that they laid off. The management is either incompetent or they're trying to depress wages. They openly admit they're trying to achieve "durable savings" which seems like it may be an MBA code word for depressing wages.

Collusion is the default human condition. It is absence of collusion that has to be proven.

Or are we assuming governments around the world are effectively preventing collusion of multi-national corporations? Now that would require incredible proof.

Of course not. It wouldn't support the narrative. Just like I work for a firm that was 100% in the office before the pandemic, many processes still even being done with a large amount of paper.

Now we are 100% remote and never going back. I am sure we are not the only one but no one wants to click that story.

Those things don't constitute a capital strike. Businesses don't suppress wages to strongarm the government, they suppress wages because they want higher profits. Likewise with prices.

Return to office might be more organizational pathology than rational self-interest, but it's still not an attempt to influence policy.

> Businesses don't suppress wages to strongarm the government,

They do threaten to relocate operations overseas. And when they do, the wages paid may indeed be "higher" than average in the new regions.

Maybe, but there was also bipartisan legislation to crush the rail strike, simultaneous dismantling of pandemic protections on the state and national levels, the removal of the child tax credit, and so on and so forth.

That crypto part is an assumption. If you want real irrational allocation, check back to office and how and of capital overlords are pushing it for no rational reason.

I would say it’s more rational than crypto as the tech companies investors and commercial real estate investors have a significant degree of overlap. Crypto was little more than digital tulip mania.

you know that's exactly what they said in 2017 about crypto and now Blackrock is pushing an ETF. what a tulip that was pushed by biggest financial org. isn't it. 0 handsight about future

There’s a sucker born every minute.

Here's the problem: "crypto stuff" is just the easy, low hanging fruit. That went away when the Fed began hiking. We're long past that now, with 30 year treasuries at 5%, and venture capital defines itself by extremely long duration speculative investment. That's irrational allocation in a world with high real rates.