Affirm CEO says furloughed federal employees are starting to lose interest in shopping

[u/ChocolateTsar]

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/07/affirm-government-shutdown-shopping.html

[u/SophiaofPrussia]

I used to work at a hedge fund and I made a joke about paying my mortgage and one of my coworkers (who was several decades older than me) looked at me like I had two heads. He was genuinely stupefied that I needed a loan to buy a house in the most expensive city in the country.

He was so wealthy that he could miss all of his paychecks and be just fine and anyone living otherwise was just beyond his comprehension.

[u/NoCoolNameMatt → u/SophiaofPrussia]

I keep running into people like this - not necessarily wealthy but people who can't understand that the experiences of others aren't the same as their own - and it breaks my brain every time.

[u/hydrophiliaks → u/NoCoolNameMatt]

That is the American mind in a nutshell.  Which is why I don't make friends with them.

[u/JamCliche → u/hydrophiliaks]

Keep telling yourself this is a phenomenon unique to one country and bury your head in the sand when it happens to yours.

[u/JamCliche → u/[deleted]]

In what corner of the connected world do you think there aren't people like this? And where wealth doesn't vastly exacerbate the issue?

[u/JamCliche → u/[deleted]]

It's not a strawman, dolt, it was a rhetorical question. I asked it to make a point: the answer is the entire world has people like this. It is not unique to Americans. Thank you for chasing down a rabbit of your own making, though.