Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Thursday, December 17th. I'm Erica Pandey,

filling in for Nialaboodoo. Here's how we're making you smarter today. Google is in the

antitrust crosshairs. Plus the downward spiral of public life. First though,

the Great American Economic

Chasm is today's one big thing.

So I want to share two statistics I read in the Washington Post yesterday that pinpoint the two Americas

we're living in right now. On the one hand, 45 of America's 50 biggest public companies

turned a profit during the pandemic, but at the same time, nearly 8 million Americans fell into poverty.

Felix Sam and Zaxios' chief financial correspondent, and he's here to help us make sense of this.

So Felix, the unemployment and poverty numbers tell us that working people are experiencing

a recession.

Why aren't CEOs living that too?

Well, some of them are, right?

Just because you're turning a profit

doesn't mean that your profits aren't down.

So you kind of expect, especially in a recession

like this one, where the big win and the small lose for the biggest

companies to be making some kind of a profit. Now there were definitely big companies

that are losing money like Disney lost all of its revenues

from theme parks and Boeing lost all of its revenue from selling planes. Most of the

companies it is true are making more money than they thought they were at the beginning of the recession and maybe more money than when they started laying people off they thought they were going to start losing money and it turns out that they didn't.

Big corporate America is really doing just fine right now.

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