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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.

In just a three-year period between 2019 and 2022, office buildings nationally have lost roughly $506.3B in value, according to the researchers. Office buildings lost $69.6B in New York, $32.7B in San Francisco and $5.1B for Charlotte, they wrote.

"The primary reason for the change is that we now estimate a more persistent work from home regime than before," Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business and one of the co-authors of the report, wrote in an email...

While apartment rents in the city have climbed to record highs as the city recovers its residents, office usage has failed to follow suit. Office occupancy in New York remains below 50%, according to Kastle Systems data, and landlords are feeling the pain as a result.

SL Green, the city's largest office landlord, is facing a credit downgrade, while Vornado has said it will stop paying dividends to owners of its common shares for the rest of 2023 as it seeks to shore up its finances.

Large employers like JPMorgan Chase and Amazon have in recent months put in place return-to-office mandates, and a recent CBRE U.S. office occupiers survey found 65% of the companies now require employees to return to the office at least some of the time. But that has not affected investors' views, with the biggest publicly traded office landlords experiencing significant slides in their stock prices and an increase in short sellers.

"The key takeaway from our analysis is that remote work is shaping up to massively disrupt the value of commercial office real estate in the short and medium term," the authors wrote in the report. "This conclusion is consistent with our finding that firms appear to demand substantially less office space when they adopt hybrid and remote work practices, and that such practices appear to be persistent.