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Comment by marta_morena_29 | Hacker News Reader

Except that there is a big difference: If a rich person loses his job and 50% of his savings, he will still go on to be rich and well off for probably indefinitely as long as the stock market works. They will also have an easy time finding a new job. If a poor person loses his job, that's now a homeless person. And the chances of getting a job after that are slim.

Bottom line: Yeah we are totally all in it together, except that for people who are well off, COVID is nothing but a minor bump on the road to early retirement, while for poor people its a life disrupting, potentially fatal calamity.

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"...as long as the stock market works." If the stock market truly works, it will reflect the underlying economy and its prospects. Right now, it is being propped up by the Fed (and other actors, like SoftBank), and does not reflect the underlying economy or its future prospects (at least as projected by most economists). That cannot be sustained indefinitely.

But your general point is probably correct, based on the experience of the Great Recession. This study concluded that while all households lost about the same percentage of wealth, the wealthier households recovered more quickly: https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2015/The-Rich-Got-Richer.pdf. The Economic Policy Institute concluded similarly that the bottom 80% was hit harder than the top 20% (https://www.epi.org/press/news_from_epi_th_great_recession_e...).

As long as the stock market works, the pricing represents long term growth rather than short term setbacks.

It represents projected long term growth. My point was that the long term employment outlook seems pretty bleak (e.g., https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56442#:~:text=CBO%20projects..., https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-employment/u-...). So it's hard to see where the market is getting its long-term optimism. One possible answer is that it isn't long-term optimism at all, but a short-term expectation of continued government intervention prior to the November election.

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