Warning: conspiracy theory incoming. Imagine you are an investor, one of those big guns that are on top of a few big companies. You have a lot of money, but because you're smart you don't invest it all in tech companies. Some of it goes to, let's say, real estate. Now imagine what would happen to that money if companies no longer needed offices, those huge and expensive offices... Also, you invest in an overseas company. There's lots of profit there because you pay cheap to your employees. Now those employees can start working directly to US companies for cheaper than in US, but still more than is paid in that country. Now if want people working for you, then you need to pay more than these remote workers receive. There goes your extra profit And the way this happened really shows that companies were really hoping to change the way of working after COVID, but someone didn't allow that.