exactly what are the correct stats. I'm curious.
Originally Posted by CJ7
Although I'm a bit too lazy to go look up data right now, a quick back-of-the-envelope analysis would look something like this:
Aggregate U.S. household net worth is something like $65 trillion, as I recall (although that number may be a few quarters old).
But just for argument's sake, and to err on the conservative side, let's assume it's $60 trillion. As you can see, if the wealthiest 400 households owned 25% of the whole pie, their mean net worth would be $37.5 billion. I read recently that the
aggregate net worth of
all Forbes 400 individuals is about $1.7 trillion. That sounds about right to me, since it seems reasonable that the
mean net worth of the 400 wealthiest households would likely be around $4.25 billion.
Just a hunch here, but I'm guessing that Louie got the 50% number from a recent report indicating that the net worth of the Forbes 400 is at least equal to that of the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution. That may be true, since most households in the bottom half have little or no savings and net worth. But that's entirely different from saying that the top 400 "own 50% of all wealth."