A core belief of the trickle-down cult is that rich people are the center of the economy, shining their glory on the rest of us. So if things go sideways in the economy, it’s always someone else’s fault — and that someone else is almost always a worker. That’s how the problem of businesses offering low wages gets turned into the idea that “nobody wants to work,” the problem of managers being unable to motivate their employees gets turned into the idea of “quiet quitting,” and the phrase “get a better job” serves as a default response to any complaint at all. 

This nonsense has been going on for years, but after all the recent talk of labor shortages, the latest turn is a doozy: the Wall Street Journal is now writing that the biggest problem facing bosses these days is that not enough employees are quitting. So apparently, two of the most damaging things a worker can do are 1) quit their job, and 2) not quit their job.

Make it make sense.

An excellent way to measure the health of supply chains is to look at what’s happening in the freight market: specifically, are there enough trucks and truck drivers available to move the goods that need moving? One key indicator is the freight rejection rate, which measures how often shippers reject loads. If there’s not enough freight capacity to meet the demand to move goods, shippers will get overbooked and have to reject some loads; if there’s more freight capacity available than goods that need to be moved, shippers are unlikely to reject any jobs on offer.

As this chart crafted by trade publication FreightWaves shows, after hovering around 25% for all of 2021, freight rejection rates have plummeted below 5%, indicating an abundance of freight capacity and smoothed-out supply chains. Of course, better shipping conditions don’t immediately lead to lower prices, because corporations don’t just cut retail prices because their own costs go down. But it is another indication that at this point, greedflation is the main thing keeping prices elevated — not supply chains, not deficits, and not wage increases.

It’s well documented that many major financial institutions have long engaged in discriminatory practices — including steering Black borrowers to subprime loans, selectively choosing where to open bank branches based on neighborhood demographics, and using credit scores inappropriately — even though lenders have been formally barred from discriminating since 1974 by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Passing a law doesn’t automatically change corporate practices, but you’d think the existence of the law ought to have at least stopped big banks from overtly rejecting loan applicants solely and explicitly on the basis of their identities.

But that’s not the case at Citibank, which is being charged with violating federal law by denying credit to people who bank managers believed to be Armenian. And it wasn’t even subtle: anyone with a last name ending in ‑ian or ‑yan was denied credit or subjected to far more intense screening and verification than applicants whose last names didn’t sound to bank staff like they might indicate Armenian heritage. The practice was so standardized in the Glendale, California area (home to a large Armenian-American population) that Citibank staff who failed to flag potentially Armenian loan applicants were disciplined. The penalty for this remarkably overt racism: Citibank will have to pay about $26 million out of its $1.7 trillion in assets.

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