Except in this case the emperor and all of his advisors have been telling people for months all about how he wanted to go around naked insisting that he is wearing clothing, and all of the dumbass peasants truly believe he’s wearing a beautiful new outfit in spite of the obvious fact that he’s running around naked.

If things don’t recover by the time I retire I have bigger things to worry about than retirement.

Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.