I think this gets at another issue: our economy has a lot of pointless, redundant jobs that only exist because the economy needs to keep people employed. Cheap

I think this gets at another issue: our economy has a lot of pointless, redundant jobs that only exist because the economy needs to keep people employed. Cheap money policy at the fed was always intended to minimize unemployment, but many of those jobs were unnecessary. Those jobs won't survive the next couple years. The flip side of cheap money is inflation, and it's been building up in the economy since the 2007 crisis. The inflation has been hidden by stagnant wages and falling commodity prices from globalization, so it's led to "top heavy" inflation -- the value of a dollar has been shrinking as the supply of dollars has increased, but that extra supply of dollars has been almost exclusively concentrated in equity markets. Prices of goods have remained in check because the vast majority of people simply don't have access to most of the new money. See also all the US companies sitting on hundreds of billions in cash, stock buybacks, and corporate debt. I believe the US has 2 economies: one denominated in dollars, the other denominated in millions of dollars. It wasn't seen as "inflation" because most of the inflation indicators used by the federal reserve target the consumer economy. I think we're about to have a really bad decade as all this starts to unwind. The housing market is the first place this will hit (and we're seeing it already); capital will start to flow into REITs buying up residential properties and we'll see prices stay high even or even rise in an economy when they shouldn't be. All but the wealthiest individuals will be priced out of the market (this is already the case in many cities). That means more renters, higher rents, and zoning laws that prevent new housing starts. The two economies will start to bleed together in the margins between the millionaire economy and the individual economy -- with disastrous results for the people of the country.