New data from the US Federal Reserve System (FRS) on the level of welfare of Americans in the first half of 2020 showed sharp differences between them depending on class, age and race.
While the richest one percent of Americans have a combined net worth of $ 34.2 trillion, the bottom 50 percent, who are about 165 million people, account for just $ 2.08 trillion. And almost the same (about two trillion dollars), according to the Bloomberg billionaire index, was the fortune of the 50 richest people in the country. This is $ 339 billion more than they had at the beginning of 2020. “The pandemic is further widening the wealth and economic mobility gap,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said recently.
Another key reason for inequality is that the vast majority of Americans are not benefiting from rising stock prices. The presence of 90 percent of the population in the stock market has been declining for nearly two decades. According to the Federal Reserve, the richest one percent of Americans own more than half of the shares of corporations and mutual funds, and 10 percent of them own more than 88 percent of the shares.
The Fed’s data also shows that the millennial generation controls just 4.6 percent of U.S. wealth, even though it accounts for the largest share of the workforce (72 million people). As in the country as a whole, the wealth of young Americans is concentrated in just a few hands. Three millennials – co-founders of Facebook Inc. Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskowitz, as well as the heir to Walmart Inc. Lucas Walton – personally control one in every $ 40 belonging to their generation. Overall, white Americans own 83.9 percent of the national wealth, compared with 4.1 percent of black families, who have remained unchanged since 1990.
Newspaper headline:
The gap is growing