The explosion in U.S. wealth inequality has been fuelled bystagnant wages, increasing debt, and a collapse in assetvalues for the middle classes

Income and economic equality have been on the rise in recent decades – but has this trend been fuelled only by increasing pay packets for the richest, or has wealth inequality risen as well? Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman find that over the past three decades the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent has increased from 7 to 22 percent. They write that the growing indebtedness of most Americans through mortgage and credit card obligations, combined with the collapse in the value of their assets during the Great Recession, and stagnant real wages have led to the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90 percent of families. They warn that without policies to reduce the concentration of wealth, such as estate taxes, within two decades the gains in wealth democratization which occurred in the New Deal and after World War II may well be lost.