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Even then, that median net worth figure includes paper gain on primary home value. But homes are very illiquid because of mortgage rate changes and most scenar
by swatcoder 3y ago
Even then, that median net worth figure includes paper gain on primary home value.
But homes are very illiquid because of mortgage rate changes and most scenarios where people can actually draw cash out of primary housing require some major change in lifestyle since both rents and replacement homes mostly track those same paper gains.
This report is mostly “see, things are great! Please please please don’t panic!” spin.
- epistasis 3y agoWealth does not need to be liquid to be wealth. Particularly when that wealth is a claim to not to have to pay rent, the biggest single expense of nearly every non-home-owning household. The problem isn't that the wealth is illiquid. The problem is that housing wealth incentivizes behavior to turn housing into a zero-sum problem and thereby drive up the cost of housing, to the benefit of current homeowners at the express cost of all future generations and non-owning workers right now.
- mikeyouse 3y agoThis report is an annual survey with published methodology and unsurprising results. Why does everything involving the Fed turn into a conspiracy theory? You can see exactly the composition of the increase in net worth, there's no secret motive to publishing this report that they always publish - it's just survey data. The dataset is actually really interesting: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Net_Worth;demographic:all;population:all;units:median https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...
- drewcoo 3y ago> Why does everything involving the Fed turn into a conspiracy theory? Because they are a secretive cabal of elites who have some control over the economy. Or maybe because they keep telling us "the economy" is great but most people's day to day lives are worse and we can tell when someone's lying to us even if we can't quite pinpoint that lie.
- epistasis 3y agoMost people's day to day lives are worse? Whose? By what metric? In an age of mass propaganda, of all the people who are lying to you for their own purposes, why in the world would you think it's the Fed?
- xwdv 3y agoSo if all that paper gain doesn’t mean anything because it’s not liquid then I guess people wouldn’t mind if it suddenly evaporated right?