 This is a Bloomberg Money Minute. The pandemic savings that helped Americans weather high prices in recent years are gone, contributing to a loss of consumer firepower rippling through the economy. Hoyt Blakely is a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. The federal government matched a lot of the consumer saving by borrowing quite a bit on the government side. And so those things kind of counterbalance each other. That let consumers save extra during a period when at the early part there were just fewer opportunities for spending.