Carla Javier

For sure.

I mean, I think that's really where we're one of the key concerns that we have is that even if it's not a financial crisis that kicks off our next concern, it may be that we have some other economic shock that hits the economy and then it's followed by another financial crisis.

because there's limited room for additional borrowing on the part of governments, may make a follow-on crisis for any other impact on the economy.

Thank you.

If you're a business owner and your workforce becomes, say, twice as productive, that means it can finish a day's work in half the amount of time.

You could send them home or you could have them make or do more stuff so the business can make more money.

That's exactly where economists would say that productivity is the elixir for our overall output growth.

That's Nicole Servi, an economist with Wells Fargo.

She says more productive businesses can use that extra money to grow, to buy new equipment, maybe open a new location, and... If you have stronger profitability because you're producing more per hour worked, you could turn around and reward your workers by giving them higher wages.

But higher productivity doesn't always mean higher wages.

Ben Zipperer, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says ever since the 1980s, wage growth has been held back by de-unionization and too much unemployment.

When there's more people trying to find a job, that means that employers don't have to work as hard to find workers.

And that puts downward pressure on hourly pay.

And Zipperer says that's why wage growth hasn't kept up with productivity growth.

workers are almost producing twice as much as they used to produce in real terms since 1980 or 1979, whereas hourly pay basically grew by only a third of that.

That gap started to narrow again after the pandemic.

Demand for workers picked up, and that encouraged them to find better jobs, which in turn increased both productivity and wages.

Those productivity enhancements allowed companies to pay much higher wages, but they also got something for paying higher wages.

That means a stable and better suited workforce that is more productive.

More recently, as productivity has grown, companies haven't been as eager to raise pay.