alt Hacker NewsNot quite. Poor people suffer more in real terms, but rich people suffer more in nominal (dollar) terms. Nominal inequality gets reset.
Don't let the term "nominal" undersell this: it's nominal inequality that locks working people out of assets and imposes upon them the need to service the (otherwise) exponentially growing profit expectations of their economic complements. At no point in the cycle is it better to be poor than rich, but the contractionary quadrant is the one where the gap shrinks.
Replies
> Nominal inequality gets reset.
Why would it? The wealthy people who haven’t allocated their capital to those assets that are depressed from a recession can reallocate to the depressed assets and end up even wealthier on the rebound. People with no money at all don’t have that opportunity to invest.
Not sure it works like that: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9122750/
Inequality declined temporarily during the recession, but reached new highs during the recovery.
2008 decreased inequality for a very short time, but inequality increased overall. The rich have the available assets to profit from instability and are able to ride out unemployment, for the poor a crash and losing their job can be existential.