Wealth in the United States is concentrating into fewer and fewer hands, a trend that IPS has tracked in two previous Billionaire Bonanza reports in 2015 and 2017.
Our analysis is based on the Forbes magazine list of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the United States and the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances.
In this report, we analyze the grand fortunes of the wealthiest individuals and families and compare their wealth to the absence of wealth at and near the nation’s economic bottom. The wealth of the rest of the country has not kept pace with the billionaire class.
- Three dynastic wealth families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have seen their wealth increase nearly 6,000 percent since 1982. Meanwhile, median household wealth over the same period went down by 3 percent.
- The proportion of households with zero or negative wealth is nearly one in five, about 19 percent. These families living without wealth survive without any buffer from economic calamity.
- Four in ten families could not come up with $400 if they needed it in an emergency, according to a recent study from the Federal Reserve.
If we don’t intervene to reverse these dynamics, we’re moving toward a 'patrimonial capitalism,'" Chuck Collins writes for the Guardian, "where the heirs of today’s billionaires will dominate our politics, culture, philanthropy and economy. That’s a world none of us will want to be part of. | 
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