The Top 0.1% of Americans Now Hold More Than Six Times the Wealth of the Entire Bottom Half
A gap that keeps widening at the very top
The richest sliver of America now holds more than six times the wealth of the entire bottom half of the country combined. The top 0.1% of households control about $28 trillion, roughly 15% of all US wealth, according to Federal Reserve data. The bottom 50%, by contrast, hold about 2.5%.
Stocks did the heavy lifting
The concentration has accelerated sharply since the pandemic era. Federal Reserve data analyzed by the Wall Street Journal shows the top 0.1%, roughly 137,000 households, have more than doubled their wealth since the end of 2019, gaining about $14.5 trillion in that stretch. Around $10 trillion of the increase came from stocks and mutual funds, and the group now holds more than $16 trillion in equities and funds alone. The bottom half, whose wealth sits mostly in housing, owns less than $400 billion in stocks and mutual funds.
The average household inside the top bracket holds more than $200 million. Even the merely rich are being left behind: the rest of the top 1% grew about 68% over the same period, a strong gain that still lagged the very top by a wide margin. Entry into the group keeps getting harder, too, with the minimum net worth measured at $45.8 million in 2022, the most detailed Fed reading available, before wealth at the top rose by roughly half again.
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Options market and stocks to watch
Wealth concentration is a market structure story as much as a political one. When a thin slice of households holds an outsized share of equities, their reluctance to sell becomes a structural bid under SPY and QQQ, while consumer-facing names split along the income ladder: luxury and premium brands keep pricing power as mass-market retailers in XRT fight for a stretched bottom half.
The data also lands in a midterm cycle dominated by cost-of-living politics, which keeps wealth-tax and capital-gains proposals in the debate and the mega-cap names that dominate the top's portfolios at the center of it. Follow wealth and macro data on the Unusual Whales news feed.
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