Wealth

The nation’s aggregate wealth continues to show signs of recovery, but that wealth recovery has been concentrated on the wealthiest Americans. Meanwhile, the aggregate net worth for America’s economic middle is actually declining.

A few critics have portrayed our report as an effort to foment a “generational war” over Social Security and Medicare. Let me respond.

Until the housing market and home equity levels fully recover, the typical American household still has a ways to go.

Although household-income growth for African-Americans has outpaced that of whites since the 1960s, those gains haven't led to any narrowing of the wealth gap between the races.

Despite large and persistent gaps between blacks and whites on virtually every indicator of economic well-being, about half of all whites say the average black person is about as well off financially or doing better than the average white person, according to a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center.

While the stock market has been surging, there is a big gap who who benefits that has implications for the strength of the economic recovery.

During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released Census Bureau […]

After running up record debt-to-income ratios during the bubble economy of the 2000s, young adults shed substantially more debt than older adults did during the Great Recession and its immediate aftermath—mainly by virtue of owning fewer houses and cars, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Federal Reserve Board and other government data. […]