• fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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    10 months ago

    Historical data would be great. How was that figure in each previous decade? Isn’t it true that at the peaks this tends to happen, and when we get a stock market downturn, the rich get poor faster then anyone else?

    • Riskable@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      Even when the stock market crashes the rich don’t get poor. They can seemingly lose ungodly amounts of money exceptionally quickly but even after all that they’ll still be rich because being rich is a comparison: If everyone on a mountain falls down the ones at the top will still be there.

      • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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        10 months ago

        I mean if we’re talking about top 1% you’re probably right, but I believe in the top 10% there’s a bit of movement. Out from it and in to it from below.

        And there are plenty of examples of people going from being extremely rich to being bankrupt and never recovering. It’s not impossible, but probably requires quite a lot of effort and/or stupidity. For instance, when Iceland went based and let its banks fall, this guy went from being worth $1B to -$750m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Björgólfur_Guðmundsson

        • Copernican@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I think I crack the top 10 percent income earner I agree (not sure where I am in the USA net worth wise). I don’t consider myself rich, but that is very much in part because I live in NYC, but if I didn’t live there I probably wouldn’t be 10% earner. A big market change could have very significant impacts on my life, housing, etc. Fuck the 1% percent though.

          One thing I have noticed about folks that talk about income and wealth in my bracket is that they talk about Stock benefits like options, RSU’s, and ESPP as income. When I was making salary and around folks under 75k no one really talked about those types of benefits as income meaningfully (partially because they didn’t get it or didn’t get a significant amount of it). But for those high income earners in the top 10% that factor their stock as part of their income lifestyle, that puts them more at risk for greater income swings in the event of market crashes to a certain degree (assuming job loss doesn’t occur).

    • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com
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      10 months ago

      Click on the link. Literally the first thing in the article is a graph over time.

      tl;dr it was about 80% in 1990, and is now 92.5%. Or alternately, the bottom 90% of the population owned 20% of stock market wealth in 1990, and now they own 7.5%, so around one third as much as a generation ago.

      • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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        10 months ago

        Yeah, probably, but now you’re talking about top 0.1%, not top 10%. I mean technically the former is also in the latter, but you know.