Historical data would be great. How was that figure in each previous decade? Isn’t it true that at the peaks this tends to happen, and when we get a stock market downturn, the rich get poor faster then anyone else?
Even when the stock market crashes the rich don’t get poor. They can seemingly lose ungodly amounts of money exceptionally quickly but even after all that they’ll still be rich because being rich is a comparison: If everyone on a mountain falls down the ones at the top will still be there.
I mean if we’re talking about top 1% you’re probably right, but I believe in the top 10% there’s a bit of movement. Out from it and in to it from below.
And there are plenty of examples of people going from being extremely rich to being bankrupt and never recovering. It’s not impossible, but probably requires quite a lot of effort and/or stupidity. For instance, when Iceland went based and let its banks fall, this guy went from being worth $1B to -$750m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Björgólfur_Guðmundsson
Click on the link. Literally the first thing in the article is a graph over time.
tl;dr it was about 80% in 1990, and is now 92.5%. Or alternately, the bottom 90% of the population owned 20% of stock market wealth in 1990, and now they own 7.5%, so around one third as much as a generation ago.
Historical data would be great. How was that figure in each previous decade? Isn’t it true that at the peaks this tends to happen, and when we get a stock market downturn, the rich get poor faster then anyone else?
Even when the stock market crashes the rich don’t get poor. They can seemingly lose ungodly amounts of money exceptionally quickly but even after all that they’ll still be rich because being rich is a comparison: If everyone on a mountain falls down the ones at the top will still be there.
I mean if we’re talking about top 1% you’re probably right, but I believe in the top 10% there’s a bit of movement. Out from it and in to it from below.
And there are plenty of examples of people going from being extremely rich to being bankrupt and never recovering. It’s not impossible, but probably requires quite a lot of effort and/or stupidity. For instance, when Iceland went based and let its banks fall, this guy went from being worth $1B to -$750m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Björgólfur_Guðmundsson
Click on the link. Literally the first thing in the article is a graph over time.
tl;dr it was about 80% in 1990, and is now 92.5%. Or alternately, the bottom 90% of the population owned 20% of stock market wealth in 1990, and now they own 7.5%, so around one third as much as a generation ago.
Only if you consider “getting poor” going from a $200B net worth to $175B net worth.
Yeah, probably, but now you’re talking about top 0.1%, not top 10%. I mean technically the former is also in the latter, but you know.