Orla McCaffrey

speaker

593 appearances 13 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2020 last heard Jun 2022

Orla McCaffrey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Most Americans Got Richer Last Year, But Those Already on Top Did Best · 28 Jun 2021 podcast

And we saw them buy a bunch of assets like mortgages.

So that was really good for investors.

And then also on the fiscal side, Congress gave Americans multiple stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits.

So people were able to stay afloat for the most part.

And working from home was another big cost, say, for the minority of Americans who could do it and those who still can.

You know, you're not paying for child care costs, even though I'm sure that takes a different kind of toll on you.

You're not paying for commuting costs.

So some people were really able to sock away some money from working at home.

So the people who gained the most were kind of unsurprisingly like those along the top of the income spectrum and along the top of the wealth spectrum.

So the more income you had pre-pandemic, the more wealth you had pre-pandemic, the more wealth you gained during 2020.

And that's mostly because people with more income and by definition, people with more wealth have more assets.

And assets saw major inflation during the pandemic.

So if you own a house, home prices are way up.

Equities are way up the stock market.

And those are long-term boosts to your wealth that are likely to endure.

So more than 70% of the increase in wealth went to the top 20% of income earners, and about a third went to the top 1%.

So that pretty clearly conveys that the gains were really lopsided toward the upper end of the income and wealth spectrums.

Everyone else did better than they were expected to do.

If you were to compare how someone, let's say on the bottom half of the income spectrum, those who make less than the median, they probably did better since the pandemic started than they would have during 15 months of the 2008 financial crisis.

Yeah.

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