Excess savings is the amount by which savings rose over a baseline as a result of the pandemic and the fiscal policy interventions in 2020 and 2021. (Unemployment benefit boosts, PPP, stimulus checks, refundable child tax credit, muni government bailout, etc.) Added to that, behavioral changes in the pandemic increased household savings because there were fewer leisure and entertainment expenditures (vacations, restaurants, movies) The numbers were enormous, and some economists draw a line from that to the lack of available workers. Why work delivering pizzas on Sundays when you still have 5000 in the bank from last year.
but at the article points out, that money in their savings is going to dwindle down. If they are choosing to not work eventually they will need to come back to work. Employers are wising up a bit, now that we have gone through ‘the great resignation’ period.
There are 3 kinds of folks in these circumstances, the first is the one who chooses not to work, the second is the one who invested in finding a better job or education for a better job, the third is those who chose to become self-employed. Which when is come to personal economics all looks good on paper.
But...on the macroeconomic scale all three of those positions currently are high risk scenarios. All three are depending on the oligarchs to be able to make the right moves.
And as history tells us, that has never happened yet.