Alarming new data suggests a new recession could wipe out half of all U.S. households, which only recently recovered from the last recession a decade ago.
The economic expansion, driven by a booming stock market and rising house prices, that has doubled the net worth of the top 1 percent virtually ignored the bottom half of U.S. households, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Those household have only recently regained the wealth lost during the 2007-2009 recession and still have 32 percent less wealth, adjusted for inflation, than in 2003, according to the Federal Reserve.
Wealth inequality grew faster than income inequality during the decade-long economic expansion, making the current wealth gap the widest in the postwar period, according to a study by German economists Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick and Ulrike Steins.
That's largely driven by the lopsided distribution of wealth assets.
More than 85 percent of the assets owned by the top 1 percent are financial assets such as stocks, bonds or stakes in private companies, while more than half of all assets owned by the bottom 50 percent comes from their family home or other real estate.
The bottom half of U.S. households generally aren't carrying as much debt as before the last recession, which destroyed housing wealth and caused many families to lose their homes.
Many of those families never bought another home, and first-time home ownership has gotten more difficult due to regulations enacted to prevent another crisis, tougher credit standards from banks and higher down-payment requirements.
As a result, builders have focused on higher-end homes for buyers with good credit and high incomes, and affordable housing has become even more scarce and more expensive.
The inflation-adjusted price of a starter home rose 56 percent between 2011 and 2017, when real median incomes increased by only 12 percent.
Home ownership has fallen to about 37 percent in 2016 for those families in the bottom half, from 43 percent in 2007 -- although home ownership for all U.S. households has risen in the past three years.
But housing prices still have not reached their 2006 peak, although financial assets have jumped 72 percent since the recession.
