Americans at every income level are richer than they were before the pandemic…Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk says the bottom arm is holding up better than most people think…pointing to spending growth of about 4% to 5% a year for every income group since 2024…
The Fed’s wealth data backs him up. Household net worth is up more than 70% for every income group since early 2019, by Yahoo Finance calculations, including about 73% for the lowest-earning fifth and 85% for the top 1%.
DB2
Our national debt is up about 83% since 2019.
And our cumulative private debt is up about 116% before you even begin to count all the tricks being used to disguise the real amount of private debt.
Does that impact your analysis?
Well, net worth – up over 70% for every income group – includes debt (which is subtracted). The 70+ percent increase is also an inflation adjusted number.
DB2
I have SERIOUS doubts that the lowest fifth have had their net worth increase by 73% in less than seven years.
I can’t find any data from any government site that support that (but can’t find any data that shows it at all).
Here is what I could find - bottom 50%
From Q12020 through last quarter, Total Assets increased 43%. Even if we were to use Q12019, the increase is just 59%.
It is fair to assume the bottom 20% did worse than the bottom 50%.
Federal Reserve’s 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances (released in October 2026), the median net worth for families in the lowest income quintile actually dropped by 6% between 2022 and 2025, falling to $12,840.
intercst
Agreed; I couldn’t come up with the Yahoo Finance numbers. The Survey of Consumer Finances shows that from 2019 to 2022 the median family net worth increased from $11.9K to $18.5K for the lowest income quintile (55% in six years). There may have been some covid bloat, as it was back down to 10% in year seven.
A spreadsheet can be downloaded here:
DB2
Here’s a fun video I ran across a couple days ago. Short and snappy: It’s the US wealth distribution, with pictures:
What people think would be ideal:
What people THINK it actually is:
What it actually is:
Well, there’s a #4, in which he details how he doesn’t have enough room to show the actual 0.1%, because there isn’t enough room on the screen, space on your computer, paper in the universe, so if you’d like to see the video, it’s here: (I have only found it on Facebook Reels, so far, but it’s probably elsewhere)
Even on election day, overleveraging has some drawbacks. Don’t ya know.
You suspect this is mostly due to rising value of real estate. Great for home owners. Leaves out renters. Yes, they are running up their credit cards due to costs rising faster than income. Home owners can pay their debts w home equity loans.
We should not be surprised these people are cutting their spending, eating out less, ands saving every way they can. Their wealth is diminishing. It is not a golden goose.
As Bernie Sanders keeps pointing out. “One man owns more wealth than the bottom 50% of US residents.”
intercst
Musk:
Paid 11 billion in taxes in 2021
First new US mass auto manufacturer in 75 years
Has created more employee millionaires than any other business owner in history
Reduced rocket launch costs by 75%
Providing worldwide communication and internet capabilities to some of the most remote and poorest areas
Sanders
Spent 35 years in office and his greatest legislative accomplishments is to rename two Vermont post offices
And most years he pays a lower tax rate than the bottom 50% added up. Millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet pay a higher overall tax rate than Musk. That’s why he spent hundreds of millions in political donations. To avoid billions in taxes and accelerate his path to $2T in net worth while the bottom 50% not only fall farther behind, but do so at an accelerating rate.
I always wondered what lighting a pile of half-a-billion $1 bills on fire would look like.
He indeed did that.
He didn’t do the rest of this. The employees did this.
Hawkwin
Tired of hero worship.
Yeah sure, there was an organic and spontaneous coming together of employees with no direction, no culture, no mission and no one that supplied the capital and took the risk. It’s not hero worship but the ability to recognize achievement, when it occurs. It also doesn’t minimize the contribution of the team around him, richly and financially rewarded for their efforts.
Despite a massive head start and existing infrastructure, Boeing couldn’t compete with Space X and no other major US auto manufacturer has been able to compete with Tesla. You could give Sanders 5X the capital and a decade head start and he still wouldn’t know what to do with it.
It’s okay to separate the business achievements from the rest of the noise and give credit where it is due.
It was capital gains taxes.
And now the country is ready for a major new hike in corporate tax rates.
Yep, at whatever the Govt set as the rate. I don’t see your point.
I don’t distill elections down to single issues. People vote for many different reasons and those reasons are often rational and irrational. The greatest mistake that elected officials make is misinterpreting what the public is mandating or simply expressing as frustration with the powers that be.
“It’s the economy stupid”.
I don’t have any interest in discussing the reasons. It doesn’t serve any purpose with my investing decisions. If anything, the markets reaction today confirms my own belief that gridlock might be what best serves investors.
