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To combat inflation in the housing market. A subset of White collar professionals (such as those in Tech, Real Estate, Finance) ended up earning so much that housing became unaffordable as a small but significant minority began buying multiple investment properties

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/10/rent-inflation-bide...

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/31/labor-market-high-i...

“Tech and finance are taking the impact of rate hikes the hardest because they gorged the most on low rates,” said David Kotok, chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors. “But if you are a carpenter or a retail worker right now you can still quit your job whenever you want and instantly go somewhere else and get paid more. This won’t continue to be true if we go into a real recession.”

2 comments

Tech workers are a small portion of workers overall

HN has a lot of main character syndrome. Anyone posting here is closer to 1/330,000,000th of Jay Powell's concern.

Indeed. Dude is concerned about inflation for the US dollar. Last thing he’ll care about is 20-something making 200K a year sending emojis over the Internet.

Not really. The richest American, aka 1/330,000,000 is is the top 0.0000003030303%, and is non other than Elon Musk, according to Forbes, assume you're referring to rich Americans (which excludes Bernard Arnault and Carlos Slim Helu), followed by Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. All $100-billionaires. An amount so staggeringly higher than mere mortals that it does everybody a disservice to lump them in with mere millionaires. You may have heard of tech millionaire Linus Torvalds (net worth $50 million) or Urs Hölzle (Google; $10 million). The top 0.000003% have five orders of magnitude more money.

Everyone is closer to being a millionaire than any of the billionaires mentioned.

I found this visualization by MKorostoff very educational on just how staggeringly much money a billion dollars is. https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

But a significant portion of the top 10% of Americans economically.

The top 10% of Americans by combined household income is any household (not income, household) earning ~170k or above. [0]

Layoffs at this point have mostly been within the tech industry only, hence why rates continue to be hiked. Who cares about techies who most live and vote in already dark blue districts. To win elections you gotta decrease inflation in purple districts and red districts with much more diverse economies. (Big reason Big tech started nearshoring in Atlanta, Austin, Nashville, Columbus, and RTP btw - to get some political capital from legislators in Red states)

This is why you see Dems who get most of their support from white collar professionals like Warren and Ro Khanna slamming rate hikes as they negatively affect their core constituents. [1][2]

This is a white collar recession [3] and most Americans aren't white collar. Hence why you are seeing strong job growth in blue collar jobs still [4] leading to even higher rate hikes, because they clearly aren't negatively impacting most Americans

[0] - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-money-top-1-5-100000529....

[1] - https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/28/warren-elizabeth-re...

[2] - https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/11/jerome-powell-riski...

[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-13/tech-layo...

[4] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/03/employment-report-b...

You are correct. The FED is not targeting tech workers as implied above; they do not have a granular "toolkit" at their disposal. Although workers in growth industries will be harder hit due to valuations being based on future cash flows.

I never implied the Fed is targeting tech. I said rates hikes are used to minimize asset inflation caused by speculation driven by the top 10% of Americans. Tech is just overrepresented in that top 10%.

More than you'd think. BLS says 4.4 million software engineers in the US. Compare that to:

5.5m Nurses

4m Teachers

9.8m Retail workers

Sounds more like a personal frustration.

Rates are hiked to combat a high CPI. Housing costs, with the exception of home-related taxes, are not even included in the CPI.

Home prices rose a blistering 18.8 percent in 2021, and rent has climbed 17.6 percent nationwide over the last year, industry data shows. But those prices, the result of a severe supply shortage fueled by municipal government restrictions across the country, haven’t fully shown up in inflation figures because leases are typically annual.

“The housing shortage is going to push up the overall [consumer price index] to uncomfortable positions for the Federal Reserve,” National Association of Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun said. “Consequently, this high inflation that we have is certainly not transitory, and it’s going to remain stubbornly high through the end of the year.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/18/housing-costs-infla...

Also, the CPI DOES include cost of housing - https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...