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Jonathan Nachmani, a managing director with Madison Capital, a commercial real estate investment and finance firm, said hundreds of billions in office building loans were coming due in the next two years. He said banks hadn't been selling loans en masse because they didn't want to take losses and there wasn't enough interest from big investors.

"It's because nobody wants to touch office," said Mr. Nachmani, who oversees acquisitions for the firm.

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Michael Hamilton, one of the heads of the real estate practice at O'Melveny & Myers, said he had been involved with a number of deals in which banks were quietly giving borrowers a year to find a buyer for a property -- even if it meant a building was sold at a substantial discount. He said that the banks were interested in avoiding a foreclosure and that borrowers benefited by getting to walk away from a mortgage without owing anything.

"What I have been seeing is the cockroaches are starting to come out," said Mr. Hamilton. "The general public does not have a sense of the severity of the problem."''

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Yet Mr. Kelly of J.P. Morgan lists various reasons that periods of U.S. economic growth may be elongated and less chaotic going forward. Federal deposit insurance, introduced after the Depression, sharply reduced bank panics and failures. Vastly improved information on inventory levels among goods-producing businesses, he said, has "tamed" the inventory cycle, preventing mismatches between supply and demand that can cause mass layoffs.

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[But] Mr. Herndon noted the work of the 20th-century Polish economist Michal Kalecki, who argued that business leaders feel "undermined" by the maintenance of full employment. Using their substantial influence over policy, Kalecki argued, they can help institute restrictive economic policies that bring times of economic expansion to an end and reset them with softer, more tolerable labor power.

And Mr. Herndon said he thought old-fashioned "bubble" manias and "credit cycles" remained a danger, too.

The report, compiled by the progressive Groundwork Collaborative thinktank, found corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year's second and third quarters. Profits drove just 11% of price growth in the 40 years prior to the pandemic, according to the report.

Costs have come down substantially, and while corporations were quick to pass on their increased costs to consumers, they are surprisingly less quick to pass on their savings to consumers," Liz Pancotti, a Groundwork strategic adviser and paper co-author, said.

The super-wealthy are treated particularly lightly by the tax system, with the top 1% paying less than every other income group across 42 states. In most states, 36 in all, the poorest residents are taxed at a higher rate than any other group.

The most regressive states in terms of taxation are, in order, Florida, Washington, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Nevada. The least regressive jurisdictions are DC, Minnesota, Vermont, New York and New Jersey.

Various state-level policies, such as cutting taxes on the wealthy to supposedly drive economic activity, has worsened this situation, the report found.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has repeatedly warned that rates will need to remain "higher for longer" to truly tame inflation. But many Wall Street leaders, encouraged at inflation's steep fall from its June 2022 four-decade high, believe peak rates are already here.

Grant, however, takes a historical reading of monetary policy, and argues we're in for a generation of rising rates, with some volatility in between. "The phrase would be higher for much, much, much, much longer--but we have to underscore and italicize the conditional--if past is prologue," he told Fortune.

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"We seem to have hit some major point of demarcation with interest rates in 2020 and ‘21," he added. Based on history, he said, this new regime should last 40 years. Still, Grant clarified that the generation-long uptick likely won't be a straight line up. If a recession hits, there could be a "substantial," although temporary, pullback in interest rates.