What's driving the gap between the richest and poorest Americans

Economic inequality between the richest and poorest Americans is continuing to widen, boosted by the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to data from the Federal Reserve, household wealth among the top 1% of Americans grew from $17.08 trillion in Q3 2010 to $35.3 trillion in Q3 2020, and currently sits at $42.13 trillion. (Wealth is defined as the value of all assets of worth owned by a person or entity, while income is the money that the person or entity received in exchange for labor or products, according to Investopedia.)

On the bottom end, however, "modest gains have been largely temporary," Sarah Anderson, the global economy project director at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Inequality.org, told Yahoo Finance. She noted that the bottom 50% of households, which is nearly half of the U.S. population, owns only 2% of the nation's wealth, as of 2019.

For the top 0.1% of earners (the multi-millionaires and billionaires), both household income and earnings have soared over the past decade as part of an ongoing trend. As of 2018, the concentration of income among the top earners is almost equal to levels seen just prior to the Great Depression in the 1930s. The U.S. also saw similarly high levels of income concentration ahead of the financial crisis in 2008.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/whats-driving-the-gap-between-the-richest-and-poorest-americans-165307278.html