The Vibecession Is Entirely Rational

Another round of vibecession discourse has arisen, as Americans yet again yell at each other on the internet about an economy no one can agree on. I have spent much time trying to tap into my finance degree to explain the disconnect between what is objectively, the strongest post-2020 economy in the world, and the seeming widespread belief among short-form video content creators that we are in year seven of Great Depression 2. The data is nuanced, which is a big reason why this debate is so interminable, because it is defined by naive content creators and hyperbolic posters like Will Stancil and the infinite number of tankies in his mentions endlessly arguing about economic data they have all spent a combined zero years studying in any serious depth. It is fucking exhausting for those of us who have been humbled by how much we don’t know about this subject to hear people like Will Stancil say that it is 100% vibes while the people in his mentions say that data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is obviously faked. Any time anyone says they are dead certain about something in economics or finance, this is what you sound like to everyone who has ever studied or worked in these admittedly voodoo-adjacent fields.

The data scientist G. Elliott Morris wrote a terrific piece last month about models he built that explain how consumer sentiment can keep plunging to all-time lows alongside a low unemployment rate and an all-time high stock market. Before reading it, I did agree with the Stancilites and thought that consumer sentiment surveys just broke for some unknown reason after the COVID shock and weren’t as valuable as they used to be, but Morris’s models changed my mind. In short, it’s the prices, stupid, and this gets to part of economics that neither the vibes-based Stancilites nor the BLS truthers have grasped. The BLS truthers have BLS data proving them right, and Stancil wrong.

When the inflation figures come out every month, it is not one simple “here is how much everything went up or down” figure. There are separate numbers for separate industries combined into separate measures, and the CPI one the media likes to report as “inflation” is not the inflation figure that policymakers at the Fed look at. Core Personal Consumption Expenditures (Core PCE) is the headline figure that all medium to smart money pays attention to each month, because it excludes food and energy, which tend to have volatile price swings that can bork the headline inflation figure reported by braindead mainstream media. Morris used Core PCE to build a model that tracked consumer sentiment, and he successfully back tested it to track consumer sentiment in previous eras to prove the model is not a quirk of this depraved one.

Not only do the 100% vibes-based believers focus on flawed data, but they talk about inflation in hyper-specific contexts that don’t fully capture the vibes they’re trying to explain. Yeah, sure, inflation has been going down since its peak at 9% in 2022, and before Trump reignited inflation with his liberation day tariffs in April of last year, Core PCE in March 2025 was 2.67%. The Fed nearly won its battle against inflation before Trump lost it for them, and this is used as proof that the bad vibes folks don’t know what they’re talking about. 

But 2.67% compared to what? This is what so many non-economic knowers miss when trying to explain inflation data. I know Will Stancil knows this, but I’m not sure how many Stancilites pushing his entirely vibes-based argument know that inflation data is reported relative to the previous year. That is a 2.67% rise compared to March 2024. Rising inflation is good, it’s also called economic growth, you just don’t want too much of it or unhealthy kinds of it, and the Fed’s target for good inflation is 2%. We are currently around 3% core PCE amidst the largest energy shock in history sure to push it higher to some degree, and the bad vibes have returned.

But people don’t look at prices by strict year over year metrics the way a financial analyst does. We are still dealing with the after-effects of a gargantuan supply shock in 2020 that reshaped the entire world for at least a generation, and if you compare prices to 2019, one might wonder what the fuck Will Stancil and his ilk are talking about. Keeping Up With Inflation tracks a lot of prices relative to 2019, and here is a list of everything they’re tracking that is up relative to 2019 with how much in parentheses: inflation (28%), CPI inflation rate (33%), eggs (84%), Netflix (54%), Disney+ (172%), gas (24%), ground beef (77%), auto insurance (32%), used cars (30%), Spotify (30%), Apple Music (10%), electricity (48%), water (33%), restaurants (36%), wages (28%), rent (41%), home prices (56%).

And here is a list of everything they are tracking that has become cheaper since 2019: chicken wings (-28%).

The Stancilites will surely point to wages going up, and it’s true that part of the rise in prices is that lower- and middle-income people’s wages increased relative to inflation in the wake of the 2020 pandemic shock, and expensive burrito taxis no longer subsidized by magic Silicon Valley ZIRP money unfortunately radicalized a lot of regretful Trump voters in 2024. But I’m also sure that these big-brained numbers geniuses can see how the wages figure is lower than the rent, auto insurance, home price, water, and electricity figures too.

It’s Also the Inequality, Stupid

I also think that it’s more than just hard economic data at the root of this divergence between sentiment and healthy macro measures like consistently strong GDP growth, and the vibes people have a point, although perhaps not the way they had hoped. Annie Lowery wrote in The Atlantic today about how the vibecession is becoming a “permacession,” arguing that “Americans seem to be mad about everything, or in spite of everything.” She cites a paper from Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business about “the happiness crash of 2020.” He found that “This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies,” and “The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions.”

That happiness crash is the lie called the American Dream being exposed to many people who believed it, which then bleeds into economic sentiment figures. Unemployment hit Great Depression levels in 2020, and late 2020 and most of 2021 was defined by a generational bull market in stocks and crypto. People with assets partied like mad until the great inflation print of November 2021 showed that the ZIRP bill had finally come due, and God forbid should American elites have to pay for it. This is America, where profits are privatized and losses are socialized.

From 2021 to 2022 we left an easy-money era that inflated asset prices, and entered one with higher inflation that benefits savers with large cash piles they accumulated from selling at high asset prices, while high interest rates punish debtors like all those contributing to America’s record $1.3 trillion in credit card debt. Sure, wages relative to inflation have gone up for lower- and middle-income earners, but not to any seriously life-changing amount beyond a few percentage points a year, and the price increases have become more visible since 2019, all while the stock-market perpetually pushes all-time highs. 

Even the people who this country is designed to benefit, well-educated white guys like me, have seen that the American Dream is not an option that is available to all of us. White people have better economic, health, etc. outcomes than non-white people in a racist country built by slaves on the graves of the natives, but the yawning gap in a capitalist system with no ceiling where only white property-owning men were initially allowed to vote is class. I have far closer outcomes to all of my non-white neighbors than I ever will to the financial elites who have colonized the town of Aspen four hours away from me in their mountain fortress. Dubai is another example of a modern-day nation-state created as a global hub for elites, an ecologically unsustainable content creation machine for crypto bros and billionaire failchildren.

Everywhere you look around the globe, you can find the victors of capitalism creating their own fiefdoms, insulated from the physical reality the rest of us inhabit. Instead of dealing with the climate catastrophe birthed by a wholly unsustainable economic system, the benefactors of that planetary pillage have brought the phrase “doomsday bunker” into the lexicon. This is all part of the gloomy vibes, and it impacts the world beyond how it makes you and me feel seeing it on social media as we worry about the future.

The vast inequality of the Gilded Age was one of the main contributors to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, and inequality is at its highest levels since the Great Depression. As of the third quarter of 2025, the top 10% own 70% of U.S. wealth, while the top 1% richest people in the United States reached a new record, owning 31.7% of all American wealth. The wealthiest 1% own a combined $55 trillion in assets, roughly equal to the bottom 90% of Americans combined. We have a K-shaped economy, this is not up for debate. 

“U.S. income inequality, on rise for decades, is now highest since 1928,” reads a Pew headline from 2013. “America’s 1% hasn’t had this much wealth since just before the Great Depression,” declared a MarketWatch headline from 2019. Elites have detached themselves from broader society this past decade, and they use their assets as collateral to take out debt to live lavish lifestyles off of and pay nothing in taxes because it’s not regular income. This is the point the Stancilites pointing to incremental wage gains for lower- and middle-income people miss: wages are a game for suckers in capitalism. You make it in America by owning assets, and the only assets really open to most Americans outside the top 10% are a dwindling set of 401k offerings now seeing heightened concentration risk and the most expensive housing market in history.  

And people know this. They know they’re getting fucked by a system specifically designed to fuck everyone outside a small cabal of immensely wealthy people who control it. That’s why meme stocks and options trading and crypto and gambling and all other sorts of get-rich-quick schemes have proliferated in an era where capital took the mask off. People know that we’re all being offered a raw deal and the real victory comes in having enough assets to reject it. Even though you may have a good job with good pay, most people know that if they were to get laid off and have a health event, they could wind up on the streets in a country whose health care system is designed to exploit sick people for money. This is such a pervasive outcome in America that lots of people openly cheered the extrajudicial murder of a healthcare CEO not too long ago. The vibes are horrific, but it starts at the top, created by greedy elites who only see a world they can exploit for personal gain. 

A middle-class dollar typically gets circulated throughout the economy, while an upper-class dollar typically goes into an asset or savings. The latter form of money just sitting there accumulating paper net worth or interest is a far less productive form of economic growth than handing a dollar to your local hardware store who hands it to their local supplier who then hands it to their regional supplier, etc. This is why inequality is economically inefficient, and the fact that capitalism is designed to produce inequality and concentrated wealth is why I attack it as not just as a moral failure, but an intellectual one as well. 

The gap between the Haves and the Have Nots is transported right to your Instagram feed 24/7. Hamburgers are becoming a luxury item as we scroll TikTok and see some extension of the Jenner clan showing off the GDP of a small island nation in a 15-second clip. This is where the BLS truthers find firmer ground to stand on than the notion that the data that supports their argument is faked, because while we presently may not be in a recession, if we had a deep financial crisis at some point in the near-future, it would not be at all surprising in hindsight and we’d have endless “it was so obvious” examples to point to. Just today, the European Central Bank warned that Trump’s oil shock risks triggering a financial crisis in an increasingly fragile global economy. 

This era is not likely going to end well. You can’t just have Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and other titans of the 1% declare that democracy is over, back a buffoon overthrowing all these institutions and norms that built the last century, and expect the status quo that created that wealth to hold. That is quite literally the lesson of the roaring ’20s our not-so-roaring-’20s have failed to understand. So much of our modern era is dependent on elevated asset prices the wealthy elite are leveraging, and their spending on luxury items has powered consumer spending. It’s not at all hyperbolic to say that much of the modern American economy depends on the consumption habits of rich people and the construction of data centers. An extreme fall in stock and housing prices would undercut so much of our modern debt-laden economy, and likely exacerbate the long-term debt problem every advanced economy in the world is dealing with. We are at the end of a long capitalist cycle, birthed out of the rubble of the Great Depression, and it says a lot that one century later, American capital spent most of it dismantling the New Deal most of America got from it, all while making the same mistakes that led us into a generational calamity. No wonder the vibes are rancid.

Note: A previous version of this included an incorrect sentence about regressive inflation and has been deleted.