Fed Brainwashing On Net Wealth In One Picture

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

The Fed released its “Z1” report yesterday on Household Net Worth and Domestic Nonfinancial Debt. Let’s dive in on wealth.

Please consider the Fed’s Z1 report on Recent Developments in Household Net Worth and Domestic Nonfinancial Debt.

Continue reading “Fed Brainwashing On Net Wealth In One Picture”

Household Net Worth Hits A Record $89 Trillion… There Is Just One Catch

Tyler Durden's picture

As part of its quarterly Flow of Funds update, earlier today the Fed released snapshot of the US “household” sector as of June 30. What it revealed is that with $103.8 trillion in assets and a modest $14.7 trillion in liabilities, the net worth of the average US household rose to a new all time high of $89.1 trillion, up $1.1 trillion as a result of an estimated $474 billion increase in real estate values, and mostly $750 billion increase in various stock-market linked financial assets like corporate equities, mutual and pension funds.

Household borrowing rose at a 4.4% annual rate, with total household liabilities grew growing by $200 billion from $14.5 trillion to $14.7 trillion, the bulk of which was $9.6 trillion in home mortgages.

The breakdown of the total household balance sheet as of Q2 is shown below.

 

And while it would be great news if wealth across America had indeed risen as much as the chart above shows, the reality is that there is a big catch: as shown previously, virtually all of the net worth, and associated increase thereof, has only benefited a handful of the wealthiest Americans.

Continue reading “Household Net Worth Hits A Record $89 Trillion… There Is Just One Catch”

My Scary Chart

Jim Cramer and the rest of the captured MSM, along with their Wall Street puppet masters, captured political snakes, and crony capitalist corporate chieftains will tell you to ignore this scary chart. It’s different this time. The Fed has your back. The economy is booming. Stocks for the long term. Where else are you going to put your money? Trust us.

AND IT’S GONE!!!! 

Guest Post by Daniel Thorton

Hedgeye Guest Contributor | Thornton: My Scary Chart - Bubble bear cartoon 09.26.2014 1

 

I published the graph below in a recent essay titled, Why the Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy Failed, but the graph deserves special attention because of what it seems to imply for the economy going forward. The graph shows household net worth (wealth) as a percent of personal disposable income. Household net worth as a percent of disposable income increased dramatically in the mid-1990s. Its collapse precipitated the 2000 recession. It increased even more dramatically during the subsequent expansion only to collapse again, precipitating the 2007 – 2009 recession.

 

Hedgeye Guest Contributor | Thornton: My Scary Chart - thornton1

 

Once again, household net worth has increased dramatically. Since the end of 2012 it has increasing by nearly 100 percentage points to 640% of disposable income. This is scary; not just because it is an incredibly large rise in wealth in a short period of time, but because it happened twice before with very bad consequences.

Continue reading “My Scary Chart”

Shut Your Mouth & Start Fighting These Political Parasites

Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via First Rebuttal blog,

I was shocked today by the absolute gaul of the Fed releasing a statement about Net Worth in America reaching record levels.  Now I get that they are under extreme pressure to sell the story that everything is rainbows and butterflies.  But surely they understand that working class Americans are going along with the story because they really don’t have any say in our nation’s policies anymore.  That doesn’t mean they want it thrown in their faces that the Fed has spent 6 years now inflating the wealth of the top 10% so much that it actually lifts the total wealth of the nation’s citizens to record highs.

The ugly reality is that the bottom 80% of Americans experienced none of that gain.  That’s right a big ole goose egg.  And so when the Fed via its ass pamper boy, Steve Liesman, start banging on about the fact that some sliver of society is being handed extraordinary wealth while the working class has lost 40% of their net worth since 2007, well a big fuck you right back at ya bub!  The Fed is very aware that the bottom 80% of Americans own less than 5% of US equity markets.  And so the Fed is very aware that its manipulation of stock prices such that it creates immense unearned wealth to those in the markets doesn’t reach the bottom 80%.  So why celebrate the results of the stock market price manipulation??

Continue reading “Shut Your Mouth & Start Fighting These Political Parasites”

THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE – CALL GRANDMA YELLEN!!!

Household net worth DECLINED by $141 billion in the 3rd quarter. I thought the economy was booming, home prices were rising, the stock market was at all-time highs, and jobs were being added at a record pace. How can this be? A quick perusal of the Federal Reserve website reveals the disturbing truth.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/current/accessible/b100.htm

Net worth means the nation’s total assets (cash, stocks, bonds, real estate) minus total liabilities (mortgages, credit card debt, student loan debt. auto loans). Please notice the previous two declines. The first was after QE1 ended. The 2nd was after QE2 ended. QE3 just ended. It seems the net worth of the .1% only grows when Grandma Yellen is dispensing free money to Wall Street.

The disturbing aspects of the report are that household assets only fell by $20 billion, as real estate appreciation made up for declines in stocks and bonds. The reason for the decline is primarily due to a surge in consumer related debt. Household debt went up by $121 billion, as those subprime auto loans and subprime student loans work their magic. Adding debt when real wages are in decline is not a bright move. But no one ever accused Americans of being bright.

I have a feeling there will be some more red lines on this graph in the coming quarters. Someone call Grandma and tell her to fire up those printing presses again. The .1% don’t like seeing their net worth decline.

 

THE TRUTH ABOUT RECORD HIGH HOUSEHOLD NET WORTH

What The Hell Is That Ticking Sound In My Head! Household Wealth – The Real Story

Yesterday the media got all bulled up over the Fed’s new data on household wealth showing that it hit a record in the fourth quarter of 2013. As usual with Wall Street’s chattering media class, this wasn’t quite the whole story, at least not the “real” story. The real story is deeply ominous.

The total net worth of households and non profits did reach a record in nominal terms. That is true. But that’s not the same thing as the wealth of individual households hitting a record in real, inflation adjusted terms. In addition, the calculation of the numbers is based on absurd assumptions which everyone takes for granted as being realistic. And if the net worth of the top 1% was lopped off, the picture would be far bleaker. But we need not even go there. By now it’s been well established that those in the upper income strata have gotten virtually all of the gains in wealth in recent years while the majority falls deeper into the economic mire.

For this analysis I just looked at the data as a whole, and did the simple exercises of dividing the total net worth of households and non-profits of $80.66 trillion by the census bureau’s estimate of the total year end population of the US of 317.44 million. Then I converted that to real terms by dividing the result by the Consumer Price Index. That’s conservative enough. It probably understates inflation by underweighting housing and doesn’t take into account asset inflation at all. But it’s a widely accepted means of converting nominal measures into real, inflation adjusted numbers. The same operation is then performed for every quarter going back in time as far as the data goes. The results are then plotted on this graph. It shows how the wealth of households has trended in real terms per capita.

Real Household Net Worth Per Capita - Click to enlarge

Real Household Net Worth Per Capita – Click to enlarge

I’ve also plotted alongside that line a graph of the Fed’s holdings in its System Open Market Account, which is all of the Fed’s paper holdings that it acquires in trades with Primary Dealers. Prior to 2007, the Fed had steadily grown its holdings at the rate of about 4-5% per year. Household wealth grew at almost double that rate beginning in 1994, prompting Alan Greenspan to proclaim “irrational exuberance” in 1996. Greenspan was particularly concerned that the prices of stocks were growing faster than the Fed’s balance sheet. That was something new. Historically they had grown at more or less the same rate.

The collapse of the internet/tech bubble in 2000-2003 took some of the bloom off the rose as household wealth fell back to the long term trend. Panicked, the Fed sharply lowered interest rates while keeping its asset growth in the 4-5% range. That was sufficient to trigger Housing Bubble I which led to record levels of household wealth per capita in real terms beginning in 2004. That tide peaked in 2006, when the housing bubble crested.

As the Fed scrambled in the early stages of the credit crisis it kept rates low, but withdrew cash from the Primary Dealer system and shrunk its SOMA to fund emergency lending programs in 2007 and most of 2008. The housing bubble crashed and stocks had a big bear market. Household wealth in real terms plunged back to trend. That’s where, like Greenspan before him, Bernanke hit the panic button, opening the floodgates on a massive surge of Fed credit into the financial markets via the Primary Dealers. That initially was followed by a slow recovery in household net worth as the stock market turned sharply and housing prices bottomed in 2009-2011. By late in 2012, both markets were trending sharply higher.

The Fed had a brief return of sanity as it paused QE through most of 2011 and 2012. The housing and stock market recoveries were actually picking up steam during that period. But that was only a temporary remission of the craziness.

Late in 2012 the Fed’s went completely mad. In spite of the fact that both house prices and stocks were in raging bull markets by that point, it opened the money printing floodgates again. This caused extreme distortions in the housing market where prices rose to bubble levels while sales activity remained near record lows. The majority of households were and are in no position to be able to afford buying a house. But prices skyrocketed because there was no supply and absurdly low mortgage rates were subsidizing buyers and inflating prices. It also caused the bubble conditions we see today to develop in stock prices.

The funny thing is that even though few houses are on the market, and even fewer are sold, the Fed and everybody else thinks that we can simply extrapolate the value of all housing based on this tiny sample of sale prices. The media, Wall Street, and the economic establishment all buy in to this ridiculous charade.

Has anyone bothered to stop and think what would happen to prices if a few more people had to sell their houses in the face of the current near record low buyer demand. These prices are fictitious in that regard. By extrapolating those few sale prices to the entire US housing inventory, the Fed creates the illusion of massive amounts of wealth and capital, backed by massive amounts of mortgage debt. It’s imaginary. It’s pure fiction. This is the essence of the fictitious capital nightmare we face. And nobody is paying attention because of the way we think about this data. It’s irrational and insane, but everybody looks at it the same way, just like they did a decade ago.

Don’t think that another collapse can’t happen, because it can. We’re making all the same mistakes, only worse because we should know better by now.

Despite what the headlines say, there’s no new high in net worth per capita, and by extension per household, in spite of all the insane central bank money creation that we’ve seen over the past 5 years. Net worth per capita was still below the 2006 peak level in real terms in the fourth quarter. No doubt that when the first quarter data is in it will be at a record, most likely by a substantial margin given what has already transpired this year. But the questions we must ask are who benefitted, and is it real?

If most people don’t own stocks, or houses in areas that have seen strong appreciation, and if house prices would fall in the presence of an increase in homes for sale to historic norms, then this new high in net worth is an illusion. Increasing wealth at the top of the household wealth strata cannot carry an economy to growth indefinitely. “Wealth” based on a tiny sample of inflated sales prices at record low financing costs cannot be actually liquidated. It isn’t real. If the majority do not experience economic gains and therefore provide a strong and broad base of real demand that can sustain active markets with normal levels of inventory, then the growth of asset prices will once again eventually slam back to trend, and probably worse.

We have seen that three prior surges in household net worth driven by cheap and easy central bank credit have crashed back to earth after about 5 years of extreme bubble gains . The current surge is now in its fifth year. What’s that ticking sound I hear?

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WHO DESTROYED THE MIDDLE CLASS – PART 2

In Part 1 of this three part series I addressed where and how the net worth of the middle class was stolen. In Part 2, I will tackle who stole your net worth and in Part 3, why they stole your net worth. Now let’s zero in on the culprits of this crime.

Dude, Who Stole My Net Worth?

“Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel—an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy. So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising.” Charles FergusonPredator Nation

When you dig into the charts and data supplied by the Federal Reserve generated report, the data which goes back to 2001 tells a story not addressed by the deceptive, manipulative, political propaganda that passes for investigative reporting by the captured mainstream media. The chart below compares the median versus mean income growth from the last three Fed consumer surveys. Overall, it reveals a lost decade of negative income growth for the average middle class family. In the early part of the decade the average middle class family made some progress as jobs were relatively plentiful and the internet crash mostly impacted the rich, who own most of the stocks in the country. This is why the median income rose while the average income fell. The wealthy have a large impact on the average because they own the vast majority of assets in this country. The stock market debacle was unacceptable to the oligarchs and their money printing puppet Greenspan.

Both the liberal and conservative wings of the ruling oligarchy were in complete agreement. A new bubble needed to be blown in order to refill the coffers of the ruling class. Paul Krugman spoke for the liberal wing:

“To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.”

Greenspan and his handpicked successor Bernanke represented the conservative wing by reducing interest rates to ridiculously low levels, failing to carry out their regulatory obligations, encouraging recklessness, and purposefully failing to acknowledge and deflate the greatest housing bubble in world history:

“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.” Alan Greenspan – February 2004

“House prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years. Although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.” – Ben Bernanke – October 2005

“With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.” – Ben Bernanke – November 2005

The master plan worked like a charm from 2004 through 2007 as you can see by the tremendous surge in average income. The stock market rocketed by 75% between 2003 and 2007 and national home prices shot up by 50%. Wall Street creatively invented no doc, negative amortization, interest only, subprime mortgages and generated a frenzy of demand from anyone that could scratch an X on a loan document, just as Greenspan had demanded. Being “sophisticated” financial institutions, they were able to assemble thousands of shit loans that were certain to default into one big derivative package of shit and their captured lackeys at the “sophisticated” rating agencies stamped a AAA rating on the smelly pile of feces. Always looking out for the best interests of their clients (aka muppets), the upstanding Wall Street firms sold the derivative piles of shit to them as can’t miss investments. Wall Street profits went off the charts. Billions in bonuses flowed to the rich and powerful Wall Street titans. Mega-corporations generated record profits as consumers utilized the Fed induced tsunami of easy debt to buy BMWs, 72 inch HDTVs, home theaters, stainless steel appliances, granite counter-tops, Caribbean cruises, Jimmy Choo shoes, and Rolex watches in a mad frenzy of consumer delusion.

What you might also notice in the chart above is that median household income somehow declined during this decadent orgy of corporate fascist pleasure. How could this be? Table 2 from the Fed report makes it clear. The vast majority of households in this country generate 75% to 81% of their income from wages. Virtually none of the income generated in 85 million households (the bottom 75%) comes from interest, dividends or capital gains. You need money to make money. The top 10% only generated 46% of their income from wages. The report does not provide details on the top 1%, but wages most certainly account for less than 20% of their income. Interest, dividends and capital gains represented 22.2% of the income for the top 10%, while it represented less than 1% of income for the bottom 75%. This data is the smoking gun that proves that Federal Reserve policy and control fraud on a grand scale by the titans of Wall Street was designed and executed to benefit only the wealthy elite billionaire class and their co-conspirators. All the income gains during this time accrued to the psychopathic amoral financial oligarchy. The average family saw their real wages decline and anyone lured into the housing market during this time frame by the “sophisticated” financial experts at Citicorp, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and the other members of the Too Big To Fail criminal syndicate was set up for epic loses.

Source of Household Income By Percentile of Net Worth

As expected, the psychopathic banker class could not be satisfied with the results of their looting. Their gluttonous voracious greed culminated in a historic collapse of the worldwide financial system resulting in a housing implosion, stock market crash and 8 million middle class Americans losing their jobs.  The Fed report does show that average household income declined more than median household income after this historic financial oligarchy created collapse. One look at Table 6 from the Fed report will explain why. Only 15% of families own stocks and only 50% have retirement accounts. Approximately 50 million households in the country have virtually no stocks and less than 30% have retirement accounts. The top 10% wealthiest households, with a median household net worth of $1.2 million, proportionately own 3 times as much stock as the average family and 90% have retirement accounts. Therefore, the 57% crash in stocks impacted the top 10% to a greater extent, while the average family was most impacted by the 28% drop in home prices.

9 out of 10 Young People Don't Invest in Stocks

Despite the fact that the median net worth of the top 10% actual rose from $1.17 million in 2007 to $1.19 million in 2010 (while the bottom 80% saw their net worth decline by 36%) the losses in the stock market were intolerable to the banker predators and their captured government parasite politicians. All the “solutions” to the Wall Street induced financial debacle have been designed to benefit those who committed the crime and should have done the time. The singular design of those pulling the strings was to replenish the treasure chests on Wall Street, engineer a stock market rally to pump up the net worth and capital gain income for the 1%, and protect the vested interests of the financial elite. All the obscene criminally generated profits created during the boom were privatized into the grubby hands of the financial predators, while the subsequent gargantuan losses were socialized onto the backs of the American middle class taxpayers and future unborn generations.

TARP was rammed through the captured Congress by the oligarchs despite a 300 to 1 opposition from the public in order to protect obscenely wealthy bankers, stockholders and bondholders. The $800 billion of debt financed political pork, disguised as stimulus, was doled out to corporate contributors, union thugs, and a myriad of other special interests. Zero interest rates are specifically geared to generate billions of risk free profits for Wall Street and to force retirees to gamble their dwindling retirement funds in the rigged stock market. Bernanke and Paulson threatened the limp wristed pocket protector CPAs at the FASB into allowing Wall Street banks to make up the value of their loan portfolios in order to mislead the public regarding their insolvency. The tripling of the Federal Reserve balance sheet from $950 billion in September 2008 to $2.9 trillion today was done to remove the toxic assets from the balance sheets of the Too Big To Fail Wall Street cabal at 100 cents on the dollar.  QE1, QE2, and Operation Twist have had the sole purpose of providing the “sophisticated” financial elite with the funds to pump into the stock market using their high frequency trading super computers.

The subsequent Federal Reserve contrived 100% increase in the S&P 500 has repaired the damaged balance sheets of the moneyed interests, while the average middle class family has sunk further into debt and despair. The powerful entrenched sociopathic marauder class cares not for the average middle class American. They can barely conceal their contempt and disgust for the masses as they blatantly flaunt their hegemony and supremacy over our decrepit decaying corrupted economic system. M. Ramsey King described the disgusting display last week:

“Jamie Dimon’s appearance before the Senate Banking Committee was a sickening display that clearly demonstrated that Congress has been thoroughly corrupted by Wall Street. Instead of grilling Dimon, Senators acted like overly affectionate puppies fighting each other for an opening to smooch their master.”

The destruction of the middle class has been methodical and systematic. The top 10% of earners had a median net worth of $1.19 million, or 192 times as much as the median wealth of $6,200 of those in the bottom 20% in 2010. In 2007, the top 10% had 138 times as much wealth as the bottom 20%. In 2001, it was 106 times as much. With the continued rise in the stock market, declining real wages for the middle class, and further home price declines, the gap between the top 10% and the bottom 20% has continued to widen. The level of pain being experienced by the middle class has reached an unprecedented extreme. A few data points from David Rosenberg make that clear:

  • Forty-six million Americans (one in seven) are on food stamps.
  • One in seven is unemployed or underemployed.
  • The percentage of those out of work defined as long-term unemployed is the highest (42%) since the Great Depression.
  • 54% of college graduates younger than 25 are unemployed or underemployed.
  • 47% of Americans receive some form of government assistance.
  • Employment-to-population ratio for 25- to 54-year-olds is now 75.7%, lower than when the recession “ended” in June 2009.
  • There are 7.7 million fewer full-time workers now than before the recession, and 3.3 million more part-time workers.
  • Eight million people have left the labor force since the recession “ended” — adding those back in would put the unemployment rate at 12% instead of 8.2%.
  • The number of unemployed looking for work for at least 27 weeks jumped 310,000 in May, the sharpest increase in a year.

I would add a few more data points to David’s list of woe:

  • Over 7.5 million homes have been foreclosed upon by the Wall Street bankers since 2008.
  • The National Debt has increased by $5.7 trillion (57% increase) since September 2008, while real GDP has risen by $305 billion (2.3% increase) since the 3rd quarter of 2008.
  • Interest income paid to senior citizens and savers has declined by $400 billion (29% decline) since September of 2008 due to Ben Bernanke’s ZIRP.
  • Government transfer payments have risen by $500 billion (32% increase) since September 2008, while private industry wages have risen by $200 billion (4.7% increase).
  • The price of a gallon of gas has risen from $1.70 in December 2008 to $3.53 today.
  • Food prices have risen by 7% to 10% since late 2008, even using the falsified BLS data. A true assessment by anyone who actually goes to a grocery store (not Bernanke – his maid does the shopping) would be a 10% to 20% increase.

The middle class has a gut feeling they are being screwed by somebody, they just can’t figure out who to blame. The ultra-wealthy elite keep up an endless cacophony of propaganda and misinformation designed to confuse an increasingly uneducated and willfully ignorant public while blurring the facts for those educated few capable of understanding the truth. They have been able to keep the masses dumbed down through government run education; distracted by sports, reality TV, Facebook, internet porn, and igadgets; lured by mass media messages of materialism; and shackled with the chains of debt used to acquire the goods sold by mega-corporations. We’ve become a society oppressed by a small faction of ultra-wealthy masters served by millions of impoverished, uneducated, sedated slaves. But the slaves are getting restless and angry. The illegally generated wealth disparity chasm is growing so large that even the ideologue talking head representatives of the elite are having difficulty spinning it. Even uneducated rubes understand when they are getting pissed on.

“Senator, don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining” – Fletcher – Outlaw Josey Wales

The situation is growing increasingly unstable and has left the country susceptible to an extreme outcome when this teetering tower of debt topples.

The moneyed interests have brilliantly pitted the middle class against the lower classes through their control of the media, academia, and the political system. They have cleverly blamed the victims for their own plight. They have convinced the general public that millions have lost their homes to foreclosure because they were careless, greedy and stupid. They blame the Community Reinvestment Act. They blame others for taking on too much debt when they were the issuers of the debt. The Wall Street moneyed interests created the fraud inducing mortgage products, employed the thousands of sleazy mortgage brokers, bullied appraisers into fraudulent appraisals, paid off rating agencies, bribed the regulators, bet against the derivatives they had sold to their clients, threatened to burn down the financial system unless Congress handed them $700 billion, and paid themselves billions in bonuses for a job well done. But, according to these greedy immoral bastards, the real problem in this country is the lazy good for nothing parasites on food stamps and collecting unemployment, who need to stop complaining and pick themselves up by their bootstraps and get a damn job. It’s a storyline used against Occupy Wall Street and anyone who questions their right to plunder what is left on the carcass of America. The vilest fraud in the history of man was perpetrated by these evil men and not one executive of these firms has been prosecuted. Obama, the champion of the little people, has proven to be nothing but a figurehead for the powers that be. Proof that the Wall Street syndicate is winning the war couldn’t be any clearer than the fact that the top six criminal banks now have 40% more of the nation’s assets in their vaults than they did before they burned down the economy.

The demonization of the victims continues, while the perpetrators prosper. The sociopaths appear to be winning; just as they seemed to be winning in the later stages of the Roman Empire.

“And we often fall into this bias on the prompting of con men and sociopaths of the predator class who use it to justify their own criminal actions and personal injustice. They are not burdened with empathy for their victims, and even delight in their misfortune. But they must find ways to make their actions more acceptable to society as a whole that normally does have such concerns for equity and justice.”Jesse

 

“Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?” –  Camille Paglia

I think you know the answer to this question.

If you missed the first part of this series, CLICK HERE to read it.

GoldMoney. The best way to buy gold & silver

ARE YOU F%$ING KIDDING ME?

This chart is shocking. The median net worth of all households in the US was $70,000 in 2009 according to a new report from the Pew Foundation. Think about that for just one minute. This means that 50% of all the households in the US (57 million HH) have a total net worth less than $70,000. If you add up their home equity, 2.2 automobiles, their 401ks, their savings accounts, their furniture and their electronic gadgets and subtract their mortgage debt, auto loans, student loans and credit card debt, you get $70,000 or less.

This data supports my Peacock Syndrome theory to the max. Americans might look like they own a lot of cool stuff, but most of them are in debt up to their eyeballs. They don’t own shit. They are renting their shit on credit. Anyone looking at this info with a critical eye would realize that these people are fucked. Anyone who approaches retirement without hundreds of thousands in savings is going to work until the day they die, or live a life of squalor in their old age.

The figures for blacks and hispanics are beyond comprehension. It leads me back to my questions about the luxury cars I see parked in West Philly, the satellite dishes on $25,000 hovels, and the supposed poor talking on their cell phones. It never added up in my mind. It didn’t add up because it doesn’t add up. When 50% of all the black households in the country have less than $5,677 of net worth, you know my observations are correct.

With north of 50 million households essentially living on the edge, how far do they have to be pushed before social unrest and chaos break out? I think it is closer than anyone thinks, especially with Washington DC not stepping up to save anyone again.

Here is a link to the complete report:

http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/07/SDT-Wealth-Report_7-26-11_FINAL.pdf

WEALTH

By MIRIAM JORDAN

The wealth gap between whites and each of the nation’s two largest minorities—Hispanics and blacks—has widened to unprecedented levels amid the housing crisis and the recession, according to new research.

The median net worth of white households is 20 times greater than that of black households and 18 times greater than that of Hispanic households, according to an analysis of newly available 2009 government data by the Pew Research Center, an independent think tank.

The disparities are the greatest since the government began tracking such data a quarter-century ago, with the gulf separating whites from other groups twice as wide as it was in the two decades prior to the recession and 2008 financial crisis, according to the study.

“In the four years between 2005 and 2009, there was a sudden and steep increase in wealth disparities,” said Rakesh Kochhar, a senior Pew researcher and co-author of the report. He said that “using average, as opposed to median, net worth would not paint as accurate a picture because it would give greater weight to wealthier households.”

The gloomy picture was precipitated by the housing bubble’s collapse in 2006 and the recession from late 2007 to mid-2009, which took a “far greater toll” on the wealth of minorities than whites, according to the report.

From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth plunged two-thirds among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% for white households.

Wealth—the sum of such assets as a home, cars, stocks, bank and retirement accounts, minus the sum of debt—is a key indicator of economic well being, alongside income. Income refers to wages, interest, profits and other sources of earnings. The main difference between wealth and income is that wealth can be passed on.

“Wealth can establish the financial status of a family for generations,” said Mr. Kochhar, who is an economist.

Late last year, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans living in poverty was at a 15-year high.

For all groups, home ownership is the biggest contributor to net worth. The surge in home prices early in the past decade was accompanied by a historic increase in home-ownership rate, to 69% in 2009 from 64% in 2004. But plummeting house values then became the biggest cause of the erosion in household wealth, the study found.

The price drop had a more detrimental impact on minorities than on whites: Hispanics and blacks derive more than half of their net worth from home equity, whereas it accounts for 44% of a white household’s net worth.

As a result of the declines, the median black household had just $5,677 in wealth in 2009, while the median Hispanic household had $6,325. The median white household had $113,149 in 2009.

The two-bedroom house of Laevonne Gordon, an African-American from Escondido, Calif., was worth $265,000 when she bought it in 2005. Now, it is valued at $81,000, and she is behind on her monthly mortgage payments. “I’m trying to get a loan modification so I can keep the house,” she said during a visit to Community Housing Works, a counseling agency in San Diego.

Hispanics were hardest hit by the housing meltdown because they are concentrated in areas that suffered the biggest depreciation in home values—Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada.

The median value of directly held stock and mutual funds dropped the most for Hispanics and blacks. The value fell 32% for Hispanics and 71% for blacks. For whites, the value fell 9%. Blacks and Hispanics in financial distress might have been compelled to sell stocks or stop contributing to their pension plans, diminishing the value of their holdings, Mr. Kochhar said.

Given that a bigger share of whites own stocks and mutual funds, and have retirement accounts, the stock-market rebound since 2009 is likely to have benefited white households more than minority households.

Extended unemployment and shrinking income are also likely to have adversely affected household wealth, said the Pew study.

Ms. Gordon, a mother of three in the process of getting a divorce, has been delivering newspapers since her home day-care-center business went downhill because many of her clients lost their jobs and their homes.

The findings are based on Pew’s analysis of data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, an economic questionnaire distributed to more than 36,000 households by the U.S. Census Bureau in late 2009.