Where are all the COVID-19 bankruptcies?

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For much of the pandemic, government aid helped lower the number of personal bankruptcies dramatically. With those measures ending, close observers say a sharp increase is likely.

Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:09.0	So, Darian Woods, if you were to pick a number that went in a surprising direction during
0:16.0	the pandemic, what would you choose?
0:18.0	Ooh, what about, um, Alice of Netflix logged?
0:21.0	I don't know if that's a big surprise.
0:24.8	How about personal bankruptcies?
0:26.9	Personal bankruptcies.
0:28.1	These actually went down.
0:29.8	Yeah, way down, right?
0:31.2	So we just got the numbers for 2021, just under 400,000 people filed for bankruptcy.
0:36.8	And that's down by about a half from 2019, the year before the pandemic.
0:42.3	But I think we're going to see that trend head the other way, like in a big way.
0:46.0	So what makes you think that, Dan?
0:47.3	Well, you know, I've got a crystal ball.
0:49.2	And we've got somebody on the inside.
0:52.6	My name is Laura Cicarelli.
0:54.0	I am a certified credit counselor.
0:57.0	Laura works for a nonprofit agency called American Financial Solutions.
1:00.9	My job basically is helping people who are having a difficult time with their finances or
1:04.9	with debt to find solutions that make sense for their situation.
1:08.5	Laura spends her entire week talking with people like dozens of people each week for whom
1:13.1	bankruptcy could make a lot of sense.
	...

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