By Karen Shaw Petrou
As Thomas Piketty’s book and much other research show, economic equality is a cumulative-return construct – that is, absent engines of growth, the rich get richer and middle-income households fall ever farther behind. Thus, when bank balance-sheet capacity shrinks and lending to core economic engines such as housing and small business falters, income distribution widens and wealth inequality grows inexorably worse. Continue reading “How Equality Hangs in the Balance Sheet”
By Karen Shaw Petrou and Matthew Shaw
On September 21, the Federal Reserve released its quarterly study of American’s net worth. As with the Fed’s earlier study on U.S. economic happiness, the release trumpeted the good news revealed in the latest aggregate data. For net worth, this means a new record in the second quarter, with national household net worth hitting an unprecedented $96.2 trillion. But, the Fed’s data do not go farther to show which Americans own how much of this giant sum. We do.
Continue reading “Is America Really Richer?”
