![]() ![]() She and her husband have more or less given up on the idea of being able to buy a home in the city where they live. “I picked up groceries this morning, and it was probably 50 percent higher than what we were paying during the height of the pandemic.” “The rising cost of everything is taking more of a bite,” she said. “My salary has not doubled at all,” she said.Īngelle Haney Gullett, 49, who works at an entertainment company, said that the economy doesn’t feel as destabilizing as it did during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, though she’s definitely taken a hit. She makes well above the median income for the city, but she still feels like she can’t keep up - her rent has gone from $900 to $1,400 over the past five years, nearly doubling. “I was told over and over again, ‘There will always be manufacturing jobs, they will always need engineers,’” she said.ĭespite having consistent health care coverage through work, including her current job, illness has left her with medical debt. Sarah, a 29-year-old mechanical engineer in Atlanta whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy, has been laid off twice in the past three years. “I was told over and over again, ‘There will always be manufacturing jobs, they will always need engineers.’” “And all this is happening in spite of the fact that we have historically strong labor markets.” “It’s really been kind of a barrage of negative financial and economic developments that are hitting higher-income people more than usual,” Hsu said. That put wealthier consumers on edge about the health of the banking system overall, especially when the banks in trouble were ones they and/or their employers were customers of. Per the so-called “ wealth effect,” consumers feel better about their spending and finances when the stock market is doing well and their portfolios are up, even if it’s only on paper.Īs stock market turmoil eased up, bank failures took the economy by surprise, when Silicon Valley Bank and others went under. “That’s something that doesn’t really affect people at the bottom income distribution they’re not really exposed to stock markets directly.”Īccording to Gallup, 84 percent of Americans making over $100,000 own stocks, compared to 29 percent of Americans making under $40,000. ![]() “As families started to adjust their lives to this new world of inflation, higher-income folks were also being hit by a volatile stock market,” Hsu said. First it was inflation then it was everything else. The country is not in a recession, nor is it imminently heading into one, but consumers, at the top and the bottom, say everything sucks.įor Americans in the higher and, say, higher-ish income brackets, it’s like they can’t catch a break. That convergence has typically been brief - high-income people start to bounce back quickly.Įmily Stewart’s column exposes the ways we’re all being squeezed under capitalism. “We’re at very low levels of sentiment, and unlike most periods over the last 75, 80 years, higher-income and lower-income folks have similar levels of sentiment.”ĭuring clear points of decline, like when the economy is sliding into a recession, there’s usually convergence, because everyone’s feeling pain at the same time. “About a year ago, there started to be a convergence of sentiment by income,” she said. Historically speaking, higher-income families have consistently felt more confident about the economy than lower-income families, explained Joanne Hsu, who runs consumer surveys for the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. From inflation to the banks, higher-income people feel like there’s no reprieve The bottom hasn’t fallen out for them, but the ground is less solid in a way it hasn’t been in the past.Īmerica’s semi-rich are feeling semi-bad, and they do not like it. What this amounts to is people who aren’t used to financial insecurity feeling uneasier than they’re accustomed to. Other issues are more recent, like inflation, which everybody hates. ![]() Part of what’s at play is the ever-increasing costs of housing and college and child care, which have caused upper-middle-class Americans to experience more of a crunch for years. Except that people higher up on the economic ladder have increasingly been feeling that discomfort, too. The discomfort of some workers - largely at the bottom echelons of the economy - is part of the deal we’re supposed to strike for the comfort of everyone else. We’re told the story that a level of inequality is necessary for growth. The American economy is, in many ways, predicated on winners and losers. ![]()
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