Notorious POD, Ep 36: Musings – Millennial Financial Well Being, Housing & Crypto

I’m a wealthy millennial and a real estate professional, but I’m from a working-class background in the rust belt, so most of my friends and family are not particularly well-to-do. I know other wealthy millennials through work, former college classmates, my wife’s work (she’s a Googler), and my volunteer activities. I also know middle-income and struggling millennials through my childhood, high school classmates, family, and neighborhood.

Your analysis here is spot-on, and I appreciate it. I’m 33 and have been a residential agent since I was 25 years old. I was still a renter when I sold my first house! I find that many commentators and analysts underestimate the (likely permanent) damage done to the Millennial generation by the Great Recession. It made it difficult or impossible to “get off the ground floor” of life for years, and it is a major reason behind so many crises including declining marriage and birthrates, in my opinion. I also think a lot of the mental health problems in this generation are a result of the generalized economic anxiety and disappointment experienced by large numbers of Millennials. Boomers raised us to think that hard work, education, dedication, and firm handshakes would lead to success but that just hasn’t been the experience of most Millennials.

Anyway, I think there will ultimately be a political response to this. We can’t have a society where only a small number of people at the top are able to pursue traditional adulthood: a career, homeownership, family. The unrest and turmoil caused by vast economic inequality always leads to some form of political response, we can only hope it will be peaceful rather than France circa 1789 or Russia 1917.

Take a look at Millennial and Zoomer spaces online if you think my allusion to revolution is overblown (reddit, tiktok, etc). “Guillotines” and “eat the rich” are frequent memes. I’d argue that the whole GME/AMC “short squeeze” phenomenon was largely an expression of anger and frustration at the financial system. I think crypto is a manifestation of the same. Young people feel locked out of traditional economic prosperity by political and economic institutions over which they feel they have no influence, and are eager to seize any type of opportunity outside those institutions.