During the pandemic, Jeff Bezos became the first person to have a net worth exceed $200 billion personally.

Meanwhile, we're cheering at an August jobs report that shows an 8.4% unemployment rate with 10 million people unemployed.

The scariest part of that jobs report to me was the number of permanent job losses, which

rose 500,000 last month to 3.41 million.

That means of the people who lost their jobs in the wake of COVID-19, 3.41 million of them

have had those jobs become permanent losses.

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDess.

What's going on, guys? It is Friday, September 4th, the beginning of the long Labor Day weekend

that transitions us from summer to fall. And I'm so excited to share this fun little episode

today. So I was looking for something to read for

Long Read Sunday, and I ran across an article by Michael Batnik, who is the director of research

at Ritholt's Wealth Management. He writes a blog called The Irrelevant Investor that tons of

you guys know, and he wrote this great post this week called All Rapped in One. And basically, he uses

eight historical analogies to describe altogether 2020. He kicks off the piece and says,

2020 is unlike anything we've ever experienced. This year includes some versions of the following.

The income inequality of the Gilded age, the election

of 1896, the pandemic of 1918, the economy of 1929, the social movements of the 1960s,

the stock market of 1987, the speculation of 1999, and the housing market of 2006.

I'm not going to read this piece. I have a piece by David

Graber, who unfortunately just passed away this week for Sunday. Instead, I'm going to actually

...