The Risk of the West Imposing the Mother of All Policy Errors

In the US, for example, there are roughly 3 million people out of the labor force since pre-pandemic. That's part of the reason unemployment numbers look so good. The savings rate is long gone along in the single digits to 35% as people sucked trillions away that they couldn't spend. A lot of that free money was permanent as governments went, no questions asked on government benefits. Finally, supply chains were choked for over a year, meaning people could not upgrade their cars and builders could not build homes. This left a huge backlog of old cars and unbilled housing once the supply chains did free up.