US – The Great Recession Was Worst on the Poor

The Great Recession hit all of us, but it didn’t hit all of us equally. It turns out the more you had to lose, the less you lost. The chart below from Amir Sufi, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, shows us this depressing story in three graphs.

And like that, two decades of gains for the bottom half of households were gone. Not that it’s exactly been a banner decade for the top 10 percent of households either — but at least they’re still 80 percent wealthier than they were 20 years ago. This shouldn’t surprise us. As Ryan Avent of The Economistpointed out, three words — cash, houses, stocks — explain these three charts. The 25th percentile get their wealth from jobs, but not from housing or stocks; the 50th percentile get their wealth from jobs and housing, but not from stocks; and the 90th percentile get their wealth from all of the above, but particularly from stocks…

Don’t Pity the Rich: The Great Recession Was Worst on the Poor
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2012/10/dont-pity-the-rich-the-great-recession-was-worst-on-the-poor/263684/