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Friday, March 29, 2024

Janet Yellen: Average Net Worth of 62 Million U.S. Households is $11,000

Courtesy of Pam Martens.

Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair

Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair

It took 200 years of hard data in a bestselling book by Thomas Piketty, awesome graphs and charts in Robert Reich’s documentary, “Inequality for All,” and years of scolding from Wall Street on Parade, but Fed Chair Janet Yellen has finally, and correctly, arrived at the idea that the nation’s economic ills are deeply rooted in the fact that U.S. “income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years.” That was the message Yellen delivered on Friday in a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, replete with stomach-churning figures from the Fed.

Make no mistake about it, coming at the end of a week that saw dramatic up and down spikes in the stock market – Yellen was sending a pivotal message to the Wall Street wealth hoarders – your billionaire standing could be as ephemeral as a day lily if we don’t fix this income and wealth gap.

Yellen quieted the crowd with this opener: “The past several decades have seen the most sustained rise in inequality since the 19th century after more than 40 years of narrowing inequality following the Great Depression.” Using data from the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, Yellen punctuated her message with these hair-raising figures:

“The wealthiest 5 percent of American households held 54 percent of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61 percent in 2010 and reached 63 percent in 2013;

“The lower half of households by wealth, held just 3 percent of wealth in 1989 and only 1 percent in 2013. To put that in perspective…the average net worth of the lower half of the distribution, representing 62 million households, was $11,000 in 2013.”

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