Via Kevin Drum, Nathaniel Popper at the Los Angeles Times reports that the number and earnings of millionaires have bounced back strongly, though real wages, on
“„No group was immune to the downturn. In 2008, as the financial crisis raged, the stock market hit bottom and the Great Recession ate into the economy, the number of millionaires in the United States plunged.
“„But last year the number of millionaires bounced up sharply, new data show. And after that decline and rebound, the millionaire class held a larger percentage of the country’s wealth than it did in 2007.“It’s been a recession where everyone took a hit — with the bottom taking a bigger hit,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies economic inequality. But “the wealthy alone have bounced back.”…
“„[Boston Consulting Group's] latest report on wealth, one of the first broad depictions of how wealth shifted in 2009, indicates that the number of U.S. households with at least $1 million in “bankable” assets climbed 15 percent last year to 4.7 million after tumbling 21 percent in 2008. “Assets have recovered much faster than we expected, to be candid,” said Monish Kumar, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group.