It can’t be gone soon enough. Even with COVID finally over (mostly) and a return to business as usual, instead of a year of prosperity and growth, we got the opposite.
For the overall economy, for family finances, and for the stock market, things were pretty dismal.
The one bright spot was the jobs market with business hiring back workers at a brisk pace and very low unemployment rate throughout the year. But there was not much else to boast about.
The U.S. economic engine stalled out into a mild recession in the first half of the year, and the inflation rate went above 9% this past summer.
For the year the Consumer Price Index (CPI) finished above 7%, which translated into the biggest annual rise in prices in some four decades.
