David Harrison

speaker

171 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2018 last heard Jan 2022

David Harrison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes Americans' Lack of Savings · 15 Apr 2020 podcast

But, you know, all that growth really didn't do much to help sort of lower earners, lower income households put a lot of money aside.

So, you know, despite the strong economy over the past few years, they were in a pretty vulnerable position going into this.

In a lot of cases, what I heard was that their jobs, you know, paid them enough to live on, but they didn't pay them enough to save anything.

So, you know, a number of them devoted a lot of their earnings to rent, to sort of copays, to medical copays, to groceries.

But, you know, in a lot of cases, they just couldn't put a lot of money aside to

either for sort of long-term things like retirement or for sort of short-term emergencies.

And so when this happened, when they lost their earnings or they lost their jobs or their hours were cut back, they just didn't have very much to fall back on.

Yeah, that's right.

So the sort of the financial assets of kind of the lowest earners, the bottom 20%, had actually been going down since the last recession.

And that's financial assets.

So that includes basically, you know, all your investments, your retirement funds, and sort of anything in your bank accounts.

So yeah, so those have been going down quite dramatically in the last few years.

And

There are a number of reasons for that that economists have identified.

First of all is that incomes have been growing pretty slowly.

If you're not getting a big raise every year, you're not able to put a whole lot aside.

And also, don't forget that the last recession was caused by a huge run-up in debt, in household debt, by the housing bubble.

And so a lot of people basically spent the years following the recession paying down that debt.

There were a few years where people were talking about deleveraging, where households were

were kind of, were paying off their debt.

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