Skanda Amarnath

It may be just...

disproportionate in terms of distribution.

If you think about the 90s comp or the late 90s comp,

labor market's definitely not as strong as it was then.

And so there's clearly like a sense of, if this labor market does not show any sort of real pickup over the next six months, we will be talking about sort of all the left tail stuff again.

It could be.

The other side of it is inflation is a lot more of a problem this time than it was in 1999 or 2000.

And so we have inflation that's tied to tariffs, inflation that's tied to the AI boom itself.

There's inflation that's tied to, obviously, the closure of straightforward moves.

So if you think about airfares are a lot higher now, and a big part of that is jet fuel.

If you think about AI boom and its impact on, basically, if you want to go buy a laptop now, you can see the price, right?

It's not what it used to be.

And there's all sorts of computer hardware, memory shortage having its impacts.

And so this is all a lot of sectoral stuff.

It stinks.

It's kind of like the 2000s in a lot of ways, if you remember.

There was a lot of random inflation that kind of creeped up around then.

So that's not great for the consumer, right?

The consumer's got to pay the bill on that.

It means they're either enjoying not as much of a standard of living improvement or, in some cases, a standard of living reduction.