US Household Wealth Hits Record Even As Economy Struggles

Since then, the S&P 500 stock index has regained its record high before losing some ground this month. It was up 2.8% for this year as of Friday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq has soared more than 20% this year.

The full recovery of wealth even while the economy has recovered only about half the jobs lost to the pandemic recession underscores what many economists see as America’s widening economic inequality. Data compiled by Opportunity Insights, a research group, show that the highest-paying one-third of jobs have almost fully recovered from the recession, while the lowest-paying one-third of jobs remain 16% below pre-pandemic levels.

The wealth data highlights the inequalities in the recovery in the sense that high-income workers not only have jobs that for the most part have come back; they also have savings that have continued to grow, said John Friedman, an economist at Brown University who is co-director of Opportunity Insights.

The recovery in household wealth has benefited mostly a narrow slice of affluent Americans. The richest one-tenth of Americans owned more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to Fed data through the end of March, the latest available. The top 1% owned 31%.