This is really going to surprise you, but the wealthy people in the United States became wealthier over the past three years. For the Wall Street Journal, Rachel Louise Ensign and Justin Lahart report on these changes with some charts.
The roughly 137,000 households who make up the nation’s top 0.1% had already become richer in comparison to everyone else in recent decades, thanks to higher incomes and lower tax rates. Now the stock-market boom, driven by strong corporate earnings and highflying tech stocks, is powering their wealth even further.
By comparison, the rest of the top 10% of richest Americans gained $38.2 trillion in wealth over the same period, but it was split among nearly a hundred times as many households.
This is based on fresh Federal Reserve data from the Survey of Consumer Finances.
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