gdl,
I became really interested, and active, in the stock market in 1992. I had only two accounts at that time, a private account and a retirement account at the same brokerage, and I did very well in the beginning, but I noticed that I did much better in my retirement account than in my individual account, and I wondered why. I knew it must have something to do with emotions but I couldn't figure out precisely what it was. Some of my holdings were duplicated in both accounts, but there were still significant differences and I clearly traded the individual account more often. So I started studying the market and the economy, and how other people traded, because I wanted to do better in both accounts. Yet the more I studied, the worse I did. It got to the point that my individual account really started to stink while my retirement account was still doing fairly well.
Then during my studies, I ran across some professionally conducted psychological studies of stock market investors and it mostly related to professional investors: fund managers, and the like; people that traded all the time for a living. You would think that they would be pretty good at it. The results of all the studies were universally the same: the more that the professionals studied the market and the economy, the worse they performed. I thought, 'hey, I have brothers!' And, as I do with most everything, I found some humor in that. Still didn't know what to do about it.
It took me a long time, but I finally concluded that the solution isn't to learn how to be a better observer of economic forces; rather, the solution is to focus only on studying price movement of the underlying, and do that offline in a mechanical way (AKA formulating technical, mathematical methods and performing computer backtesting); and to limit the trading to stocks or indices which are in a state of having good current and historical fundamental values and to not speculate on the future or anything else.
So, problem solved. I'm happy with my mechanical methods, I continually search for improvements, and now my different accounts work equally well.
I appreciate and share your many interests in all these different things, but I'm not going to allow them to directly influence my trading. In normal markets, that influence will show up in market prices and that will determine my trading through my mechanical methods.
As for relationships between wage growth and credit levels, there is nothing that insists that leads to crisis. I would argue that it leads to stagnation as everyone reaches their credit limits.
A stagnant market is a perfectly reasonable and easy market to trade. I'm pretty sure I prefer that over a more active market. The older mechanical methods I used to apply could easily dither around, flip-flop, and retrace and burn money in a flat or slowly-moving market. With the methods I use now, that type of market is very profitable and lets me sleep late into the morning. I do that by primarily selling options to all the guys with the get-rich-quick attitude who are primarily buying long and short all the time while anticipating near-term events. They're trying to predict the future and get ahead of the trade. They usually loose and they're paying me in the process. Obviously that's not the way it works because options aren't a zero-sum game, but I like to think of it that way anyway.
