Читать книгу Engine of Inequality - Karen Petrou - Страница 24

I have already established that the US is not only far less equal than President Trump said or many of us would like, but also on a downward trajectory that sharply differentiates America from many advanced democratic nations. However, this downward trajectory took a dive not during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis – when it might have been expected – but after 2010 when post-crisis financial policy kicked in. We shall see later why this was so and how financial policy made us so much more unequal so much faster than underlying trends would have forced. Now, I show that it was so.

In 2019, the wealth of the top 10 percent was 19 percent higher than it was before the crisis, even taking stock-price declines in late 2018 into account. Middle-income family wealth was still below where it was before the financial crisis and lower-income families lost 16 percent of their pre-crisis wealth (not much to start with, of course).

From 2010 to 2016, the median income of the highest-earning Americans grew 14.7 percent⁵¹ and their median net worth grew 24.3 percent in real terms.⁵² During the same period, middle-class median income grew only 4.2 percent⁵³ and their wealth rose 12 percent.⁵⁴ In fact, the middle class's recovery from the financial crisis was so tepid – particularly when compared to that of the most well off, as shown in Figures 2.2 and 2.3 – that middle-class median income in 2016 remained 2.6 percent below its 2001 level and median wealth was 5.5 percent less.

Figure 2.2 Growth in Real Income for Select Income Groups, 1989–2016

Source: FRB Survey of Consumer Finances (2016).

Figure 2.3 Growth in Real Wealth for Select Income Groups, 1989–2016

Source: FRB Survey of Consumer Finances (2016).

Things are even worse for those further down the income distribution – both of the bottom two quintiles' median wealth in 2016 was less than two-thirds what it was in 2001. Being upper-middle class is no respite either; median wealth of this group in 2016 was almost 14 percent lower than it was in 2001.

Nothing else changed that much so fast with so much impact on money and thus on who gets how much of it. Why, what's next, and how to avert it are the subject of the rest of this book.