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Comment by ArtDev | Hacker News Reader

"Household balance sheets are now in a materially better state than they were pre-pandemic".

I think this is completely of touch with the realities faced by different slices of society.

I am a web developer who was working from home for many years before the pandemic. My experience is not even remotely similar to most people in the US.

Edit: this article is written by a hedge fund. So they definitely live in their own little world too.

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"Governments transferred a massive amount of cash to households, more than offsetting lost income from COVID."

I don't understand this calculation either. It does not fit my own experience, or anyone else I know.

Likewise. I mean I do seem to have more money than before but almost none of it came via government transfers. I think we got $800 for our kids because they were schooled from home for a year or whatever. The rest is just not having things to spend it on, primarily eating out and travel. I certainly agree that huge numbers of people here in Canada benefited from government money to replace lost wages but they were mainly people in service industries who are hardly “wealthy”. So for real, what does this mean? Obviously in aggregate when you write a cheque to every person for $X it adds up, which is what I think happened in the US, but does it create wealthy households?

Wealthy? No. Flush with rapidly devaluing cash? Yes. A family of 5 with with 2 parents and 3 kids under 6 years old got a total of $19,300 (counting the monthly child credit payments), provided they didn't go over any of the arbitrary income thresholds.

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