Thanks for the great charts, Bart. The epi.org site has a page with more detail on wealth distribution, segmenting the top 20% into four groups. In rough numbers, the top 1% own a third of all wealth, the next 4% and the next 15% own about a quarter each. The remaining 80% own about 17% in aggregate.
To me, the largest impact of this distribution is that 80% of the votes belong to people without much of an equity stake in the country. That will be bad for us, as it was for the late Roman and Greek empires.
As for implications for public markets, the top 5% have a large enough amount of wealth that they have to invest it, controlling nearly 60% of all wealth. The remaining 40% of assets are spread over 95% of the population, perhaps in assets like home equity, 401-K's/IRA's, tools/equipment/land, etc. Financial markets may escape problems like loan foreclosures until rates of repayment affect financial assets directly, in the form of write-downs and insolvencies. Even then, the top X per centile will recover by buying even more assets after they have been marked down.
Equity markets have been at all-time highs. Seems reasonable, given that most of the money supporting them belongs to people who must continue to invest it. |
