Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

by Lyn Alden

During the 2020 and 2021 crisis stimulus response overall, the typical person received several thousand dollars in stimulus checks and extra childcare tax credits, but there were wealthy lawyers, investment managers, and business owners that received hundreds of thousands of dollars per person in unneeded fiscal aid, and certain corporations that received billions of dollars and laid off employees anyway. All of this was with printed money, which devalued the savings of anyone holding cash or bonds. As the dust settled over the following years, the combination of fiscal stimulus and the recovery of asset prices led to very uneven results. The bottom 50% of the population collectively saw their net worth increase by $1.5 trillion from the beginning of 2020 to the beginning of 2022. The top 1% of the population collectively saw their net worth increase by $11.8 trillion over the same period267.