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“You just have to scratch and scrape it off,” he says. “We are really struggling to get out of this.”
But in Ms Arnone’s other area, home valuation, her friends and colleagues are reaping the rewards in the booming real estate market, where January sales rose 23.7% from a year earlier. , according to the National Association of Realtors. The very low mortgage rates have caused a wave of refinancing, which requires further valuations.
“I don’t have much to complain about,” said Traci Warner, a friend of Ms. Arnone’s and appraiser in Waldorf, Maryland, south of Washington. After her husband was fired from his sales job in April, Ms. Warner’s job took over.
It’s not that things are perfect, but unlike Mr Gallagher, she doesn’t feel like she is barely hanging on.
This contrast is reflected in the big economy. Weekly jobless claims of newly laid off workers remain at historically high levels, even as stock indexes are hitting record highs.
The vaccines have arrived, but their slow rollout means it will be months before anything that looks like normal activity can resume in restaurants, hotels, gyms, airports, malls and other businesses that depend on the drug. bringing people together.
“It’s very uneven,” said Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, a forecasting and research group. “The recovery of the most vulnerable segments of the population will take years.” Not only are wages and salaries falling for the hardest hit segments of the workforce, he noted, but so are employment and labor force participation.
At the top, the gains have been staggering. In eight months after the pandemic hit the United States, the wealth of the country’s roughly 650 billionaires increased by $ 1 trillion, according to a November study by the Institute for Policy Studies and other progressive groups. That included a $ 70 billion raise for just one of these tycoons: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
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