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The recession’s inequality is a reflection of the coronavirus itself, which has caused more deaths in low-income communities and severely affected jobs in restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues

No other recession in modern history has so pummeled society’s most vulnerable. The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 caused similar job losses across the income spectrum, as Wall Street bankers and other white-collar workers were handed pink slips alongside factory and restaurant workers.

“The sectors most deeply affected by covid disproportionately employ women, minorities and lower-income workers.

At the height of the coronavirus crisis, low-wage jobs were lost at about eight times the rate of high-wage ones, The Post found.

The less workers earned at their job, the more likely they were to lose it as businesses across the country closed.

By the end of the summer, the downturn was largely over for the wealthy — white-collar jobs had mostly rebounded, along with home values and stock prices. The shift to remote work strongly favored more-educated workers, with as many as 6 in 10 college-educated employees working from home at the outset of the crisis, compared with about 1 in 7 who have only high school diplomas.

Americans ages 20 to 24 suffered the greatest job losses, by far, of any age group when many businesses closed in the spring. College-age workers and recent graduates tend to be overrepresented in low-paying retail and restaurant jobs, which allow them to gain a toehold in the workforce and save money for school or training.

In the wake of widespread closings of schools and day-care centers, mothers are struggling to return to the workforce. Mothers of children ages 6 to 17 saw employment fall by about a third more than fathers of children the same age, and mothers are returning to work at a much slower rate. This disparity threatens years of progress for women in the labor force.

The unemployed are facing new challenges. Despite President Trump’s promises of a short-lived recession, 26 million people are still receiving now-diminished unemployment benefits. The unemployed went from receiving, on average, over $900 a week in April, May, June and July, under the first federal stimulus package, to about $600 for a few weeks in late August and early September under a temporary White House executive action, to about $300 a week now on state benefits.

What ties all of the hardest-hit groups together ― low-wage workers, Black workers, Hispanic men, those without college degrees and mothers with school-age children ― is that they are concentrated in hotels, restaurants and other hospitality jobs.

Most recessions, including the Great Recession, have affected manufacturing and construction jobs the most, but not this time. Nine of the 10 hardest-hit industries in the coronavirus recession are services.

Economists worry that many of these jobs will not return

While the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 8.4 percent, double-digit unemployment lingers in cities and states that depend heavily on tourism.

over 30,000 restaurant and hospitality workers are unemployed in New Orleans, making it nearly impossible to find a job.

Ten percent of renters reported “no confidence” in their ability to pay next month’s rent, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted Sept. 2 to 14.

Black women are facing the largest barriers to returning to work, data shows, and have recovered only 34 percent of jobs lost in the early months of the pandemic.

It took until 2018 for Black women’s employment to recover from the Great Recession. Now almost all of those hard-won gains have been erased.

Historically, people of color and Americans with less education have been overrepresented in low-paying service jobs. Economists call it “occupational segregation.”

Black and Hispanic men face many of the same challenges as Black women, encountering discrimination in the workforce more often than others, and they struggled to rebound from the Great Recession.

Women had logged tremendous job gains in the past decade before the coronavirus hit.

But with many schools and child-care centers closed and the migration to online learning, many working parents have had to become part- or full-time teachers, making it difficult to work at the same time. That burden has fallen mainly on mothers, data shows. For example, mothers of children ages 6 to 12 — the elementary school years — have recovered fewer than 45 percent of jobs lost, while employment of fathers of children the same age is 70 percent back.

Single parents have faced an especially hard blow.

One in eight households with children do not have enough to eat, according to the September survey by the Census Bureau.

The Fed predicts unemployment will not near pre-pandemic levels until the end of 2023. For many jobs, it may take even longer — especially those already at high risk of being replaced with software and robots.

“Since the 1980s, almost all employment losses in routine occupations, which are relatively easier to be automated, occurred during recessions,”

Many economists and business leaders are urging Congress to enact another large relief package, given the unevenness of the recovery and the long road for those who have been left behind.

“There are very clear winners and losers here. The losers are just being completely crushed. If the winners fail to help bring the losers along, everyone will lose,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Things feel like they are at a breaking point from a societal perspective.”

But while people do abuse safety nets — and not just poor people (think bank bailouts and special tax treatment of multinational corporations) — I want to see receipt of unemployment insurance, the rolls of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and so on go up in recessions.  In fact, their failure to do so would be a sign that something’s very wrong, like an air bag that failed to deploy in a crash.

There are two reasons that T.A.N.F. was so unresponsive.  First, welfare reform in the mid-1990s significantly increased its work requirements

Second, T.A.N.F. was “block granted,” meaning states receive a fixed amount that is largely insensitive to recessions

it is a fixture of conservative policy on poverty to apply this same block grant strategy to food stamps and Medicaid.  The numbers and the chart above show this to be a recipe for inelastic response to recession, or, more plainly, a great way to cut some big holes in the safety net.

The official rate for children goes up over the recession, from 18 percent to 22 percent, but once you include the full force of safety-net (and Recovery Act) measures that kicked in, it holds steady at about 15 percent.

this figure provides strong evidence of the effectiveness of the American safety net in the worst recession since the Depression.

because the recession is receding, shouldn’t the SNAP rolls be coming down as well?

SNAP rolls remain elevated because their function remains critical in what’s still a tough job market for low-income households. 

the fact is that markets fail, and when they do, income and food supports must rise to protect the most economically vulnerable families.

let’s get this straight: the poor and their advocates were not the ones who tanked the economy.  Nor should they be on the defensive when the safety net expands to offset some of the damage.  The right question at such times is thus not why the SNAP rolls are so high.  It’s whether SNAP, unemployment insurance, T.A.N.F. et al are expanding adequately to meet the needs of the poor.

Historically, college students who graduate into a recession have settled for lower-paying jobs at less prestigious companies than people who finished college even a year earlier. Economists have found that the impact of that bad luck can linger for as long as 10 or 15 years, leading to higher unemployment rates and lower salaries — a phenomenon known as “scarring.”

The number of new job listings posted between mid-February and mid-March dropped 29 percent compared with the same period last year, according to data from the job marketplace ZipRecruiter. Postings for retail stores fell 14 percent, events jobs went down 20 percent and casino and hotel jobs dropped 23 percent.

The hiring situation will probably get worse over the next few months, as closures and cancellations ripple across the economy. “These are still early effects. The first wave of industries hit will not be the last,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter. “There will be a large human cost.”

At some job fairs in early March, major companies simply didn’t show up; now all those career events have been canceled.

Whether the class of 2020 will face long-term consequences depends on a range of factors, including the length of the pandemic and the severity of the recession that seems certain to follow. But it doesn’t look good.

A severe downturn could also jeopardize the career prospects of students who graduate later this year or in 2021.

Some industries, like nursing, have even seen an increase in job listings, according to ZipRecruiter. The number of e-commerce listings rose 228 percent over the past four weeks compared to last year. Personal consulting jobs went up 26 percent.

Over the last few weeks, many job-hunting seniors have engaged in an awkward dance with recruiters in industries like law, journalism and technology, asking for updates while trying not to seem insensitive or selfish. All the traditional rules of engagement in a job hunt suddenly feel irrelevant. A meet-up for coffee is out of the question. A request for a networking call might seem invasive.

For some seniors, uncertainty about the economy has created outrage. Most of them were in fifth grade in 2008. But they remember the damage wrought by the Great Recession.

“This is the first pandemic that I have lived through, that my parents have lived through, but this isn’t the first time the economy has not been great,” said Amy Germano, a senior at James Madison University. “If we can get through the recession in 2008, I think we can get through this.”

In looking at the political implications of this horror show, one need only recall the 2008 Great Recession. The causes of that financial collapse — e.g., unregulated financial instruments, negligence from ratings companies, lender deception, the Federal Reserve’s failure to act — were complicated.

the politicians who resisted warnings (from then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, among other people) and favored a Wild West deregulated financial industry have unique culpability. And the party in charge at the time — the Republicans — bore the brunt of the voters wrath at the polls. Do we imagine this domestic debacle will play out differently?

Trump and his Republicans are vulnerable on three counts: failure to act to head off the pandemic, failure to respond adequately to the crisis and corruption in the response

Perhaps most important, Pelosi will set up a House select committee to oversee the entire coronavirus effort, much like then-Sen. Harry Truman did for World War II funding, to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.

Trump will faces three major challenges: Did he do everything to head off a deep recession? Did he do enough to help those hurt? Did he prevent profiteering and corruption that diverted and from the needy? Unless the answer to all three is “yes,” Trump will have a hard time persuading Americans to leave him in charge of mitigation and recovery.

The yield curve hasn’t yet inverted, but the New York Fed’s model based on yields puts the probability of a recession in the next 12 months at 15%. That is the highest since the last recession and the same as in the summer of 2006, about 18 months before the recession began.

On the resource side, oil is a natural place to look for shortages that might constrict the economy and end a boom

If we knew the cycle would end soon, investing would be easy: Dump stocks for bonds. But the final phase can sometimes last for years, during which rising yields hit bond prices while stocks typically do very well.

Financial crises are worse, and we shouldn’t forget Lehman. But when the end of the economic cycle comes, investors should expect big losses even if banks don’t totter

The unemployment rate climbed to its apex of 9.9 percent 23 months after the formal start of the Great Recession. Just a few weeks into the domestic coronavirus pandemic, and just days into the imposition of emergency measures to arrest it, nearly 20 percent of workers report that they have lost hours or lost their job.

Absent a strong governmental response, the unemployment rate seems certain to reach heights not seen since the Great Depression or even the miserable late 1800s. A 20 percent rate is not impossible.

The economy is not tipping into a jobs crisis. It is exploding into one. Given the trajectory of state reports, it is certain that the country will set a record for new jobless claims next week, not only in raw numbers but also in the share of workers laid off. The total is expected to be in the range of 1.5 million to 2.5 million, and to climb from there.

The economy had been plodding along in its late expansion, growing at a 2 or 3 percent annual pace. Now, private forecasters expect it will contract at something like a 15 percent pace, though nobody really know

The markets are not normal, either. The stock market lost 20 percent of its value in just 21 days—the fastest and sharpest bear market on record, faster than 1929, faster than 1987, 10 times faster than 2007.

Yet in the real economy, everything has halted, frozen in place. This is not a recession. It is an ice age.

George J. Borjas, a professor of economics at Harvard, argues thatillegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 billion to $128 billion.

The left, Lind said,cannot cope with reality of how low-wage unskilled immigration has been driving down wages at the bottom of the labor market since the 1960s. Whenever multiculturalism collides with the interests of labor, multiculturalism wins.

The dynamic interaction of three current trends — voter anger over immigration, over offshoring and robotization, and over damage wrought by the economic meltdown of 2008 — has been crucial to Trump’s success.

: “In 1979, the four middle-skill occupations (sales; office and administrative workers; production workers; and operatives) accounted for 60 percent of employment,” according to David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. By 2012, “it was 46 percent.”

the aftereffects of the financial collapse: “The cost of the crisis, assuming output eventually returns to its precrisis trend path, is an output loss of $6 trillion to $14 trillion. This amounts to $50,000 to $120,000 for every U.S. household,”

While the recession was an economic phenomenon, its impact went beyond a sizable drop in output or consumption. The adverse psychological consequences are enormous

The “stark legacy of the recession and the lackluster labor market” are apparent in “reduced opportunity and deterioration,” according to the Dallas Federal Reserve. The number of men and women “not in the labor force” continues to grow, from 92.5 million in November 2014 to 94.4 million last month.

By one estimate, each one-point increase in total unemployment during the Great Recession depressed employment and wages for young college grads two to three times as much as in previous recessions.

Boomers presented school as an investment in ourselves, worth financing with debt because it would pay off in higher earnings later. To hear them tell it, education is the only sure investment in history. That’s now proving preposterous

The long-term problem is federal debt. Including debt owed to the Social Security trust fund, it is now around 105% of gross domestic product. Those are claims that millennials (and their descendants) will eventually have to pay, largely to fund social transfers to the boomers that they weren’t willing to pay themselves.

Worse, some 75% of federal spending over the next decade will happen on autopilot, without any intervention from elected lawmakers. Most of that is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with interest on the debt. Unless Congress finds the political will to enact a substantial overhaul of these programs, millennials will have hardly any latitude to act on their own fiscal priorities.

the tapestry that emerges depicts an enormous heist, in which boomers stole a decade from their millennial children. The boomers’ combination of naiveté, panic and negligence buried millennials in trouble. Digging our way out will be our primary economic and political challenge

Millennials seem to be intuiting that what failed most spectacularly under the boomers was the “third way,” which tried to harness the power of the market to deliver the economic security boomers thought only government could give. It sounded plausible, but the results have been one disaster after another: tech bubbles, resource misallocations that skewed the labor market, the student-loan albatross, an entitlement state that saddles us with debt while failing to deliver economic security for many recipients.

As the Democrats drift leftward, Republicans remain mesmerized by Donald Trump. Mr. Trump is a boomer through and through

2020 could become a depressing slugfest between the ne plus ultra boomer and an opponent peddling century-old socialism, neither of whom offers millennials much of a solution to our urgent problems.

If and when recession comes, the world will have much less room than usual to maneuver.

At the political level, the kind of agreement forged in London in 2009 between the G20 group of most developed countries to keep markets open, support international institutions and cooperate to stimulate their economies seems much more difficult to achieve today. And there is the real risk in many countries that recession would reinforce tendencies toward authoritarian nationalist politics.

If the short-run concern of those gathered in Davos will be how the world will deal with the next recession, the long-run one has to be declining appeal of democratic global values. In countries as diverse as the United States, Britain, Turkey, Russia, Israel and China, it appears that the governmental platform that commands the most popular support is rooted in nativism, nationalism and negativism. Populist nationalism eventually produces bad economic results, leading to more pressures for anti-establishment leadership and extreme policies.

The world can accept a message that the United States wants a fairer allocation of the burden of upholding the global system, that after a period of weak economic performance America needs to concentrate more efforts at home, and that it will be guided by its economic and security interests, not the promotion of abstract values.

But such a message needs to be accompanied by clear signals that the United States will strive to be a reliable and predictable partner, that it understands its interest in strong effective global institutions and that it recognizes that even self-interested nations can benefit from thoughtful diplomacy

“We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.”

People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to their parents or other family members for significant help

To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in their teens and 20s when it hit.

Not only did jobs dry up, but federal relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and insurance companies instead of to workers themselves.

investors picked off dirt-cheap foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American wage growth.

Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less money in savings than previous generations did at the same age. Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.

Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare for the country’s labor force.

Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a slow-rolling global disaster.

American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering temperatures of their commercial ovens,

The private-equity behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse the economy generally is for workers and consumers.

Less competition means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to improve wages, worker safety, or job security.

as with virtually all problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus might do to your future.

there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable life.

those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not significantly improving professional outcomes.

Private universities may suddenly be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict.

there is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.

What will become of Generation C?

Many types of classes don’t work particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out into the natural world.

“People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,”

Disasters, he told me, tend to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of everyday life.

Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods, scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to catastrophe than others

Children in those communities already have a harder time accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer and die during a pandemic.

in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s possible shifts.

For that to translate to real change, though, it’s crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of political agitation that were already happening before the virus. “Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,

This is where young people might finally be poised to take some control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many Millennials leftward

When housing prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections, wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for young people who experience American life as a rigged game

the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.

“There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary revolutionary change,”

The seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive candidates both locally and nationally.

Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,”

a subset of young voters believes that some American conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word lost much of its power to scare.

the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for working people.

But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.

Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too. Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to those in need.

As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though, people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,” Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe in the world, so I don’t know

About 150 public companies managed to bag more than $600m in forgivable loans before the funds ran out. Among them was Shake Shack, a company with 6,000 employees valued at $2bn. It has since given the cash back but others have not.

Fisher Island, a members-only location off the coast of Miami where the average income of residents is $2.2m and the beaches are made from imported Bahamian sand, has received $2m in aid.

The banks that were the largest recipients of bailout cash in the last recession have also done well, raking in $10bn in fees from the government loans, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.

By 2016 – seven years after the end of the last recession – the bottom 90% of households in the US had still not recovered from the last downturn while the top 10% had more wealth than they had in 2007.

For black and Latinx Americans, the situation is worse. The black-white wage gaps are larger today than they were in 1979.

Meanwhile, billionaires have been unable to put a well-heeled foot wrong. Billionaire wealth soared 1,130% in 2020 dollars between 1990 and 2020, according to the Institute for Policy Studies

That increase is more than 200 times greater than the 5.37% growth of median wealth in the US over this same period

the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased 79% between 1980 and 2018.

The hearing comes at a time of growing uncertainty over the progress of the pandemic, which has killed close to 400,000 people in the U.S., as well as the state of the economy. Retail sales fell for the third straight month in December and employers cut jobs, ending seven months of employment gains.

Mr. Mnuchin said he couldn’t extend them beyond their Dec. 31 expiration, drawing criticism from Democrats who accused him of trying to hamstring the incoming administration.

Democrats and Republicans might press her on whether the Treasury would incorporate climate change into the broader financial regulatory framework, and whether she sees a more active role for the FSOC in the Biden administration.

So fear creates recessions in the long run — and if we continue to have rising fear, the probability of a European recession grows and the probability of a US recession grows. Geopolitics is playing a bigger role in everyone’s equations.”

Geopolitical risk is a major component in shaping all our lives. We are having rising fear throughout the world, and less hope. Rising fear creates a withdrawal from consumption or spending more.

“When the Russian invasion occurred in Ukraine, we said that the peace dividend is over,” Larry Fink, chief executive of investment giant BlackRock, told The Sunday Times. “Now, with the instability in the Middle East, we’re going to almost a whole new future.

Dimon noted that inflation had “levelled off a little bit” overall, but said: “It’s not clear to me that long-term forces are not inflationary … And that’s why I’m saying rates could possibly go up from here. That’s life in the fast lane.”

Higher borrowing costs have started to hit debt-fuelled sectors that boomed in the zero-rates era — such as commercial property, where $80 billion (£65 billion) of assets across the US are in some form of financial distress, according to MSCI, and private equity.

[the legendary investor] Warren Buffett says you see who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out. Not everyone is really ready for 6 or 7 per cent rates, but I wouldn’t rule them out.”

Fink pointed out that the transmission of rate rises into the US economy was less direct than in the UK

“I’m a fundamental believer that we’re going to have higher inflation for longer, and it’s going to require the [Fed] to raise rates higher — probably one or two more tightenings — and that will ultimately be the way we get into recession.”

Many senior figures on Wall Street worry about the US government’s ability to finance itself in the medium term. As in the UK, the market for government debt was underpinned by huge waves of quantitative easing (QE) after the financial crisis, as the Federal Reserve, in effect, bought assets including Treasuries to boost the economy. Following a revival of the programme during Covid, it came to an end in March last year.

The withdrawal of QE, combined with lacklustre appetite for Treasuries among US banks and international investors such as China, could force the government to pay higher prices at a time of near-record borrowing.

“It might be a 20km headwind right now, but next year it’s going to be 25km and it’s going to grow,” a top investor said of the decreasing international demand for US government debt.

US stock market floats and fundraisings, the heartbeat of capital markets, slumped to their lowest level since 1998 last year as the spike in interest rates punctured valuations of growth stocks in sectors such as tech and healthcare.

The cautious mood on Wall Street comes against a backdrop of surprisingly strong US growth. The economy expanded by an astonishing 4.9 per cent in the third quart

the Biden administration is shovelling stimulus into the system via big pieces of legislation promising to accelerate America’s adoption of renewables, rebuild its advanced semiconductor industry and increase its spending on roads, bridges and broadband.

We have huge stimulus,” said Fink. “People are not factoring in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and the Infrastructure Act, which are about $970 billion of stimulus. Those are the largest stimuluses ever when there’s not a pandemic or a financial crisis ... And it’s at a time when you can have unions win a 25 per cent labour increase … These are very inflationary, whether it’s the fiscal stimulus or these wage increases.”

It all comes back to that word. Unexpectedly high growth, massive government stimulus and now two wars that threaten to spill out into broader crises — it all spells inflation. The flurry of hope in markets that Fed and the Bank of England have reached the top of their rate-raising cycles may yet prove premature

Of course! Romney says this as if it’s completely obvious that reducing the deficit in the short term would throw the economy back into recession, even though he and his party have been arguing the opposite case with hysterical fervor.

“In 2012, real median household income was 8.3 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.”

Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.

Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide — one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 — are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, “adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.

developers are turning 57th Street in Manhattan into “Billionaires’ Row,” with apartments selling for north of $90 million each.

“During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

“The 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled by U.S. preschools and K-12 schools in the 2011-2012 school year is the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous school year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.”

“These new poverty estimates released on Sept. 19, 2013, suggest that child poverty plateaued in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but there is no evidence of any reduction in child poverty even as we enter the fourth year of ‘recovery.’ ”

the number of households living on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month increased from about 636,000 in 1996 to about 1.46 million households in early 2011, a percentage growth of 130 percent.”

“Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power in 2013 and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation.”

The number of Americans now enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is near record highs, and yet both houses of Congress have passed bills to cut funding to the program. The Senate measure would cut about $4 billion, while the House measure would cut roughly ten times as much, dropping millions of Americans from the program.

Only 55.3 percent of young adults 16 to 29 were employed last year, according to the census, down from 67.3 percent in 2000 and again a post-World War II low.

More and more Americans 65 and older are electing to stay in their jobs. And when the economy turns around, bright, young job-seekers with fresher and better skills will come flocking out of the colleges, to take the jobs that in normal times their older brothers and sisters would be holding.

Since then, however, over-the-top warnings about the evils of debt and deficits have become a routine part of Republican rhetoric; and even conservatives occasionally admit that soaring inequality is a problem.

Moreover, it’s harder than ever to claim that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. At this point the private sector has added more than twice as many jobs under President Obama as it did over the corresponding period under W, a period that doesn’t include the Great Recession.

You might think, then, that Bush-style tax cuts would be out of favor. In fact, however, establishment candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are proposing much bigger tax cuts than W ever did. And independent analysis of Jeb’s proposal shows that it’s even more tilted toward the wealthy than anything his brother did.

The Bush administration’s determination to dismantle any restraints on banks — at one staged event, a top official used a chain saw on stacks of regulations — looks remarkably bad in retrospect. But conservatives have bought into the thoroughly debunked narrative that government somehow caused the Great Recession, and all of the Republican candidates have declared their determination to repeal Dodd-Frank, the fairly modest set of regulations imposed after the financial crisis.

The only real move away from W-era economic ideology has been on monetary policy, and it has been a move toward right-wing fantasyland. True, Ted Cruz is alone among the top contenders in calling explicitly for a return to the gold standard — you could say that he wants to Cruzify mankind upon a cross of gold. (Sorry.) But where the Bush administration once endorsed “aggressive monetary policy” to fight recessions, these days hostility toward the Fed’s efforts to help the economy is G.O.P. orthodoxy, even though the right’s warnings about imminent inflation have been wrong again and again.

Last but not least, there’s foreign policy. You might have imagined that the story of the Iraq war, where we were not, in fact, welcomed as liberators, where a vast expenditure of blood and treasure left the Middle East less stable than before, would inspire some caution about military force as the policy of first resort. Yet swagger-and-bomb posturing is more or less universal among the leading candidates. And let’s not forget that back when Jeb Bush was considered the front-runner, he assembled a foreign-policy team literally dominated by the architects of debacle in Iraq

The point is that while the mainstream contenders may have better manners than Mr. Trump or the widely loathed Mr. Cruz, when you get to substance it becomes clear that all of them are frighteningly radical, and that none of them seem to have learned anything from past disasters.

The truth is that there are no moderates in the Republican primary, and being reasonable appears to be a disqualifying characteristic for anyone seeking the party’s nod.

Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.

Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them.

Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton).

The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.

The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.

What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite.

It’s uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person wasn’t spouting gibberish. The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27 percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving “them.”

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.

The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.

Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership

In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.

The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”

What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans

Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.

Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.

More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.

Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”

He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris Christie’s. He has thrown into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long relegated to the margins.

Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.

there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.

Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.

Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections.

The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.

Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.”

Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.

Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuitio

Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right

True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.

“The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment.

There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature

Maybe the more natural condition of conservative parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses? Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it requires uncomfortable change

the economic security of most Americans dwindled, and the legitimacy of the system was called into question. One consequence has been the rise of the far right; another is Donald Trump.

Germany insisted that the struggling countries had to practice austerity in order to restore the confidence of private financial markets. In a deep recession, even orthodox economists at the International Monetary Fund soon recognized that austerity was a perverse recipe for economic recovery.

Europe, because of Germany’s worries that these policies would lead to inflation, had no way to extend credit to struggling nations or to raise money through the sale of bonds, which would have allowed the ECB to provide debt relief or to invest in public services.

The political result was the same on both sides of the Atlantic—declining prospects for ordinary people, animus toward elites, and the rise of ultra-nationalism

Not so in Europe. Parties such as the German Social Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, and the French Socialists disgraced themselves as co-sponsors of the neoliberal formula that brought down the economy.

In nation after nation, the main opposition to the party of Davos is neofascism.

In his masterful narrative, the economic historian Adam Tooze achieves several things that no other single author has quite accomplished. Tooze has managed to explain a hugely complex global crisis in its multiple dimensions, and his book combines cogent analysis with a fascinating history of the political and economic particulars

when the collapse came, it was “a financial crisis triggered by the humdrum market for American real estate.”

the collapse reinforced the financial supremacy of Washington and New York. “Far from withering away,” he writes, “the Fed’s response gave an entirely new dimension to the global dollar.”

When the entire structure of borrowed money collapsed, the losses more than wiped out all the capital of the banking system—not just in the US but in Europe, because of the intimate interconnection (and contagion) of American and European banks. Had the authorities just stood by, Tooze writes, the collapse would have been far more severe than the Great Depression:

While insisting to Congress that the emergency response was mainly to shore up US finance, Bernanke turned the Fed into the world’s central bank. “Through so-called liquidity swap lines, the Fed licensed a hand-picked group of core central banks to issue dollar credits on demand,” Tooze writes. In other words, the Fed simply created enough dollars, running well into the trillions, to prevent the global economy from collapsing for lack of credit.

Bernanke instigated government action on an unimagined scale to prop up a private system that supposedly did not need the state

Using deposit guarantees, loans to banks, outright capital transfers, and purchases of nearly worthless securities, the Fed and the Treasury recapitalized the banking system. To camouflage what was at work, officials invented unlimited credit pipelines with disarmingly technical names.

The blandly named policy of quantitative easing, which drove interest rates down to almost zero, was a euphemism for Fed purchases of immense quantities of private and government securities.

The crisis, Tooze writes, “was a devastating blow to the complacent belief in the great moderation, a shocking overturning of the prevailing laissez-faire ideology.” And yet the ideology prevailed

In a reversal of New Deal priorities, most of the relief went to the biggest banks, while smaller banks and homeowners were allowed to go under

Banks were permitted to invent complex provisional loan “modifications” with opaque terms that favored lenders, rather than using their government subsidies to provide refinancing to reduce homeowner debts

How did a nominally center-left administration, elected during a financial crisis caused by right-wing economic ideology and policy, end up in this situation?

Turning to Europe, Tooze explores the fatal combination of Germany’s demands for austerity with the structural weakness of the ECB and the vulnerability of the euro.

Portugal or Greece now enjoyed interest rates that were only slightly higher than Germany’s, and markets failed to take account of the risk of default, which was more serious than that of devaluation.

instead of treating the Greek situation as a crisis to be contained and helping a genuinely reformist new government find its footing, Brussels and Berlin treated Greece as an object lesson in profligacy and an opportunity to insist on punitive terms for financial aid

A central player in this tragedy was the European Central Bank. Tooze does a fine job of explaining the delicate dance between the bank’s leaders and its real masters in Germany. Since Germany opposed continent-wide recovery spending, the bank could only pursue monetary policy. The model was the Fed. Yet while the Fed has a congressional “dual mandate” to target both price stability and high employment, the ECB’s charter allowed for price stability only

The ECB, with the consent of the Germans, came up with one of those bland-sounding names, Outright Monetary Transactions, for its direct purchases of government bonds. But the program, at the insistence of the Germans, was restricted to nations in compliance with Merkel’s rigid fiscal terms, which limited national deficits and debts. In other words, the money could not go to the very nations where it was needed most, since the hardest-hit countries had to borrow heavily to get themselves out of the recession

Reading Tooze, you realize that it’s a miracle that the EU and the euro survived at all—but they did so at terrible human cost.

the ideal of liberalized trade, and the use of trade treaties to promote deregulation or privatized regulation of finance, is a major element of the story of how neoliberal hegemony promoted the eventual collapse. But except for a passing reference, trade and globalized deregulation get little mention here.

he has almost nothing to say about Janet Yellen. Her nomination as Fed chair in 2013 to succeed Bernanke was an epochal event and an improbable defeat for the proponents of austerity, deregulation, and bank bailouts who influenced Obama’s policymaking. Yellen, a left-liberal economist specializing in labor markets, was the only left-of-center Fed chair other then FDR’s chairman Marriner Eccles. She also believed in tough regulation of banks. The extension of quantitative easing well beyond its intended end was substantially due to Yellen’s concern about wages and employment, and not just price stability, since low interest rates can also help promote recovery.

Tooze ends the book with a short chapter called “The Shape of Things to Come,” mainly on the ascent of China, the one nation that avoided all the shibboleths of economic and political liberalism, though it also, of course, does not have a political democracy.