Top 5% holds more than half of the country’s wealth
Economic Policy InstituteThe distribution of wealth in the United States is even more unequal than the distribution of wages and income. The Figure, from EPI’s new paper, The State of Working America’s Wealth. shows how wealth is divided among American households. It merges survey data on household wealth with changes in aggregate asset prices to estimate how wealth has been affected by the bursting of the housing bubble and the Great Recession. It shows that in 2009, the top 5% of wealth holders claimed 63.5% of the country’s wealth. The bottom 80%, by contrast, held just 12.8% of the country’s wealth.
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