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The country’s richest people are incredibly, stunningly, jaw-droppingly wealthy — with more assets than millions and millions of Americans put together.
That gulf was starkly illustrated in a report this week from the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, showing that just 17 white men and three white women — see the list below — own more wealth (savings, stocks, real estate, etc.) than the entire bottom half of the American population, or about 152 million people.
Perhaps the most startling divide is the one between whites and blacks. The wealthiest 100 households in the United States are wealthier than all the black people in the country combined, according to the report, which used Federal Reserve data on American wealth and compared it with the numbers from the Forbes 400, Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of the nation’s most moneyed.
“This is indisputably divided along racial lines,” Josh Hoxie, one of the report’s authors and the director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at IPS, told The Huffington Post.
There are only five Latinos on the Forbes 400 list, Hoxie pointed out, and just two black people — Oprah Winfrey and Robert Smith, a tech investor.
It’s not just that there’s a huge gulf between African-Americans and rich white people. There’s also a huge divide between African-Americans and white people who aren’t particularly rich.
The typical African-American household holds $11,000 in wealth, while the median white household has $142,000, the report notes. Stocks and housing are big factors contributing to that divide.
