openpolitics.com

Average credit card debt per borrower is about $5,700and growing at a rate of 4.7 percent while wages are growing at about 3 percent. That can’t continue forever.

.. more families than ever have zero or negative wealth, excluding their homes.

.. household net worth since 2007 has decreased for all income groups — except the top 10 percent.

.. Net worth for the richest Americans is up an average of 27 percent. For the middle class, what remains of it, wealth has decreased 20 percent to 30 percent in real terms

.. “We believe many families in the youngest cohort we studied here — respondents born in the 1980s — are at substantial risk of accumulating less wealth over their life spans than the members of previous generations,”

.. That’s an astonishing conclusion in an economy that, as President Trump insists, has never been better. Certainly, it’s never been better for the wealthiest 10 percent of families, who now own about 75 percent of the nation’s total household wealth, as opposed to less than 35 percent in the 1970s.

.. Or for the nation’s richest 0.1 percent, who now own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent

.. the ability to build wealth rests on the ability to save, which they can’t do if interest rates are rising and eating into their earnings. The personal savings rate, at 2.8 percent, is heading in the wrong direction.

.. The overstimulated American economy will run off the cliff on its own momentum, Mr. Bernanke fears. That will leave the nation with an enormous federal deficit and not much fiscal room to maneuver. Having been essentially made to pay for the tax cuts for the richest Americans, the rest of the nation will be staring down the abyss, too.