I know this article is about Tahoe and paints a rather bleak picture...but this is nationwide. I traveled most of the east coast over the past few months, and every single city's service sectors are begging for employees. I've never seen so many fastfood places closed. And not like, boarded up, but appearing operational but having zero employees. And most weren't high cost of living areas...
We're in the middle of a gigantic reallocation of the economy after Covid. It's going to take a while to sort out who works where in the new equilibrium.
Seems to me one of those two classes will need to be inconvenienced if we don't want inflation to spiral out of control, because otherwise the asset owners will continue to buy more assets with cheap money that will push prices up, while asset consumers will continue to require higher and higher salaries to afford to pay the increasing rents to the asset owners.
Asset owners should be the ones taking the hit since they have been backstopped for far longer and are in a much better financial position to deal with it. But the asset owner class is also the one running the country and its tough to imagine them doing something against their short-term self interest.
Gonna be interesting to see what kind of equilibrium shakes out. I hope this plane can be landed without crashing...