U.S. Budget and Economy

NOTE: AN UPDATED VERSION OF THIS PAGE CAN BE FOUND AT this link My prior post looked at household assets, liabilities, and net worth as given by the Federal Reserve's Quarterly Release Z.1, "Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States" . While this report gives a good overview of household net worth in the United States, it gives no information about the distribution of that net worth. The only regular study of that distribution that I'm aware of is the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances which is conducted every three years. The last one for which data has been released was in 2004. Data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2009. Table 3 of the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances gives family net worth, by selected characteristics of families, from the past six surveys (1989 through 2004). It gives both the mean and the median of the subgroups determined by these characteristics so it'...

Every three months, the Federal Reserve releases Quarterly Release Z.1, "Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States" . That release includes table B.100, titled "Balance Sheet of Households and Nonprofit Organizations". Following is a description of the households and nonprofit organizations sector from page 170 of the Guide to the Flow of Funds Accounts : The households and nonprofit organizations sector consists of individual households (including farm households) and nonprofit organizations such as charitable organizations, private foundations, schools, churches, labor unions, and hospitals. Nonprofits account for about 6 percent of the sector’s total financial assets, according to recent estimates, but they own a larger share of some of the individual financial instruments held by the sector. The following graph shows this sector's assets since 1952 in trillions of 2007 dollars: The actual numbers and their sources can be found at this link . The values ...