Of course it hasn’t conformed to economic models. Congress keeps meddling with it, artificially inflating it instead of letting it correct itself as needed. THAT is the system. Take away its immune system and it dies, no matter how much antibiotic you prescribe.
The market is a force of nature, as variable as the weather. Economics as a science is useful only in telling us what conditions are favorable for markets as a whole, and hindsighting past phenomena.
Economic predictions are almost never reliable.