Difference in this recession vs 2008: Rich people aren’t really impacted

by ldrum13

I’m starting to think the reason stocks aren’t going down is that the people who own stocks (or who have money with institutions that invest on their behalf) have not really seen a change in their life.

Same for the pundits who are talking about stocks on the news and giving people advice. Have their lives changed that much? Honestly, probably not.

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Who has been impacted the most – lower income people with jobs in retail, service, restaurants, etc. Guess what? Generally, those people don’t even have a month’s rent in savings, let alone money in the stock market.

In 08, the crisis was more financial. People with money thought the institutions managing their investments and holding their debt were going to go under. People’s home values were dropping and they were upside down on their mortgages. Today, they are probably working from home, not really seeing much of a change in take home pay, and likely just letting their money ride in the stock market.

So if the perception of the average mid-to-upper class person with money in the market is “wow this sucks, I can’t get my haircut and have to get takeout instead of sitting down at a restaurant,” things don’t seem all that bad. Unemployment numbers don’t matter, because those aren’t your peers losing jobs, they’re people you have probably no connection with. So all you see is that we went from millons projected to die, to hundreds of thousands, to now 60K (which will obviously be exceeded). So your biggest concern was probably that you were going to get sick, but now that seems like a long shot. Now you think the economy is going to open up, and you didn’t really ever feel that much pain. Thus stocks never had a real reason to go down, but now, they should go up.

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