by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
The bottom 50% need not apply. They just get to eat the soaring costs of housing. How the Fed totally blew out the already gigantic wealth disparity during the pandemic.
On Friday, the Fed released the detailed data about the wealth of households by wealth category for the 1%, the 2% to 9%, the “next 40%” (the top 10% to 50%) and the “bottom 50%” for the second quarter, after having released less detailed figures on September 23. You read the stories at the time about how the Fed’s money-printing and interest-rate-repression has enriched American households.
But the detailed data, just now released, show whose wealth jumped the most, and who got left endlessly further behind. It wasn’t households in general that benefited, but only the richest households with the most assets. The more assets they had, the more they benefited.