Since 1989: Top 1% Up $21 Trillion. Bottom 50% Down $900 Billion.

[muriel_volestrangler]

Recently, the Federal Reserve released a new data series called the Distributive Financial Accounts, which combine the Financial Accounts and the SCF to provide quarterly estimates of the distribution of wealth in America that do sum to the aggregates in the Financial Accounts. The series goes back to 1989, the first year the modern SCF was administered and runs to the fourth quarter of 2018, the last quarter for which there is Financial Accounts data.

The insights of this new data series are many, but for this post here I want to highlight a single eye-popping statistic. Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1 percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion. The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.

To derive this, I initially take the nominal net worth aggregates for each wealth group that are provided by the Federal Reserve and subtract out consumer durables. Consumer durables are things like cars and fridges that many academics who work on wealth distributions do not consider wealth. The top 1 percent owns around 32x as many consumer durables (in dollar terms) as the bottom 50 percent owns. So the subtraction of them reduces the inequality between the top 1 percent and bottom 50 percent.
...
What the final product reveals is a 2018 where the top 1 percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets. This follows from 30 years in which the top 1 percent massively grew their net worth while the bottom half saw a slight decline in its net worth.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/06/14/top-1-up-21-trillion-bottom-50-down-900-billion/

That's: top 1% up from $8.4T, in 2018 terms, to $29.5T; bottom 50% down from $0.7T to $-0.2T - ie they are in net debt.

[panader0]

1. I have two pitchforks.

[gtar100]

2. And most republicans still refuse to acknowledge income inequality an issue.

They equate being rich with being a hard worker and job creator. Rich people kill more jobs than anyone. Every merger is followed by massive layoffs while a bunch of executives and board members make out like bandits...because they are bandits. Couple of years ago, the company I work for and another merged, there were 70,000 people working at the time. Now there are 48,000. And they call it a success. Washed their hands of 22,000 people. But they probably weren't working as hard as the executives