2 ms·
It's more than just interest: 2022 just might have been the worst non-recession year in (modern, meaning years with acceptable stats) US economic history. Every
by Phiwise_ 3y ago
It's more than just interest: 2022 just might have been the worst non-recession year in (modern, meaning years with acceptable stats) US economic history. Every tranche of net worth FRED tracks fell off a cliff that year, declining in (CPI, so we don't even need this competing metric to come to these conclusions) real terms by more than they did even during the 2020 recession [1], with the rich almost always losing more in absolute terms and the poor almost always losing more relative to their losses in 2020 [2]. If you look closely, you'll even notice that some of the rich lost more during these supposed business-as-usual days than they did during the 2008 meltdown of their moneymaking sector.
It's been pretty shocking to watch this happen, see the months roll on, and still hear basically no wideapread discussion on it in proportion to what has actually happened. We're coming up on two years of just not having an average of ~9% of our wealth we all worked hard to make from recovering from an economic equivalent of universal house arrest any more, and the best one can get a mainstream platform for is something like "possible cost of living concerns". Sure 2008 was worse for specifically the working class, but the working class are also much more sensitive to small changes in prosperity because they're not even in the same order of magnitude of diminishing returns (not to mention that it's pretty much as big a drop for them as the 2001 recession, which was also a quite painful time historically and was certainly seen as a moderate travesty before the perspective of 2008). How long can this dissatisfaction go on without starting a serious effort for acknowledgement and recovery?
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1317969 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1317969
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1326338&rn=637 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1326338&rn=637