Thursday, June 16, 2016

Complete Faith in Our Corporate Prophets and Their Shrines

The following chart shows sales and office occupation employment. 33+ million workers can't be wrong. The economy is doing fantastic.


Click to enlarge.

I know what you must be thinking. Although the parabolic trend from 1984 through 2007 failed to the downside miserably, and we're still way below trend, we desperately need to build more office space for all of our future sales and office occupation employees in an increasingly modern, digital, outsourced, and automated world. Yes! Over the long-term, we'll need a lot more office space! No doubt about it. Just need to keep the faith!

The next chart shows total private office construction spending.


Click to enlarge.

Woohoo! Forget those last two times when office construction spending fell off a cliff, this time is totally sustainable! Just look at total private office construction spending go! Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! And then once more after that just to be safe!

But really, how much faith is there? Wouldn't it be nice to know? Let's find out. The following chart shows total private office construction spending divided by total private religious construction spending.


Click to enlarge.

Hallelujah! That's a biblical amount of faith! Preys be to our new gods! Corporate shrines for everyone!

Too much sarcasm? Hell no! Too much optimism! That's what I'm always suffering from, but somehow I manage to miraculously endure.

This is not investment advice, especially for those wishing to start a new corporate cult doing new corporate things in entirely new and exciting corporate ways. Oops, I mean corporate culture. Freudian slip.

In other news, I've updated the last post to show the 8,000 doctoral degree workers paid at or below the federal minimum wage. So we've got that going for us too, which is nice. Sigh.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Employment Level: Sales and Office Occupations
St. Louis Fed: Total Private Construction Spending: Office
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

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