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The question is, when do we get coronavirus so that it's not felt to be a health emergency dominating the front page of the paper and floats into the background? Prior to Omicron, I thought it was going to be April or May 2022. If Omicron turns out not to be severe, then that might hold. If it turns out to be more severe and really have complications, especially in the elderly, then that'll be pushed down the line until we get a vaccine.
I do, you know, I don't know how to do this. I can tell you what the imperative, not that I know the path there. We need to stop making vaccines and vaccination a cultural issue and just make it a scientific medical issue. Having people mandated for vaccine is not a a big issue about, “Are you for freedom or against freedom?” It's, “Are we going to live together and respect each other and protect each other's health?” And that's, I think, going to be really important to do because we're going to have to get a very high vaccination rate and we're just not there yet.
I look at the money supply. My history has been monetary theory and policy, and it's been out of control, and it comes out, well it came out yesterday, actually, it comes out on the fourth Tuesday of every month. And although it's slowed a little bit, it is still going up at double digit rates. That's not consistent with 2 or even 3% rates of inflation.
We must get liquidity under control in the economy. The only way really to do that is the Federal Reserve, first to stop the paper, and secondly to raise rates. That's what I'm looking at. If they can do that and stop the growth of this liquidity, we’ll finally get that inflation under control. There are two labor markets.
Those that are active and moving around are getting 10, 15, 20% raises. Who is losing now are the people who are white collar workers who got their 3% raise in January, and now we have inflation of over 6%. They're losing 3%. They're not going to be so quiet next January. They're not going to be satisfied with 3% next January.
You know, you need 6% to stay even with inflation. So I think you're going to be seeing some big labor bumps in the coming months. Three things, I think, will be key areas to watch for the Fed and other central banks. The first is, of course, attention to inflation. Like I said, maybe it was transitory.
But the adjustments to supply chain and labor shortages are certainly slow to come, and it's not clear when things will recalibrate sufficiently to dissipate what might otherwise have been transitory. So the central banks are probably going to need to put in some elbow grease here. And you know, things like tapering and rate hikes are not just about inflation.
The central banks also need to create some headroom for themselves to fight the next financial crisis whenever that may come. The second issue to watch will be climate change. The Fed and definitely other central banks will continue to think about what they can do in respect of climate change, and the Fed will be focused on thinking about what it can do within the four corners of its mandate.
In some ways, it has to respond to a recommendation from the Financial Stability Oversight Council that it think about whether and to what extent climate change could impact its financial stability mandate. So it has some thinking to do there. And the third area to watch is in regard to digital currencies.
So central banks around the world, especially the Fed and the Bank of England, are considering whether to adopt a digital currency. For the Fed, there’s still very much an open question about whether a digital currency is needed and certainly whether there is the legal authority to do so. So this will continue to play out in 2022.
I think as consumers are using and are more and more relying on these gig platforms, that gives more powers to these workers. Even though they're not physically coming into the same space, they now know they have more leveraging power. So I've been studying organizing in the gig economy. In addition to that, I've been going global in my research, so I'm now on four continents studying how and what did these gig platforms look like?
And how you've got a Silicon Valley business model that has to get localized as it goes into different labor markets. And so how do people navigate disputes? How do they get access to the vehicles or the capital they need? So I'd say I'm looking at the interaction between workers and their larger environment is what I'm looking at in 2022.
And that's what the pandemic was. It, you know, brought us out of our insular bubble to look at work as how do you manage when there is one of these larger crises and things at stake?
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