re: #176 sagehen

There are two economies.

People in the lower half of the income curve (maybe even the lower 60%) — they’re seriously hurting. It’s been a shitshow for them, they’re staring down hunger and homelessness. These are people who were barely getting by when the economy was good, they certainly weren’t buying stocks.

But people in the upper half of the income curve… we have the kind of jobs that can be done on the phone or computer, we’re working at home and our incomes are the same as they’ve always been. We’re the kind of people with 401K’s and savings accounts.

But we’re not buying gas or paying bridge tolls or parking. Car insurance and gyms are rebating a significant chunk of what we were budgeted for annually. We’re not going to bars and restaurants, we’re not buying concert and theater tickets, we’re not buying plane tickets and hotel rooms and souvenir tchotchkes that used to be part of our routine annual vacation, we’re not buying new clothes. We have more disposable cash than ever because the ways we used to dispose of it are all just soooo 2019. We haven’t seen this kind of slack in our finances since 3 jobs ago; in fact, we’re pretty damn flush. Those of us who donate some of that money to food banks and so on… we’re probably not giving them all of our newfound excess. Even if we don’t pour it into the stock market, we’re leaving it in our savings accounts and the bank is putting it into mutual funds.

The 24 gallons of gas in my old Land Rover was bought in March. It is heading towards a carburettor varnish problem. You are describing a slow freeze in the economy that will leap the gap between those two worlds.