The mighty survey of consumer finances was updated.  The internet loves to pour over it & compare.

 

 https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

 

The big question was does anyone actually believe net worth jumped 25% during a time of  a massive disease & shutdown of the economy?  Either many animals really believe it or they somehow equate a migration of wealth out of Calif* to a creation of wealth that didn't exist before.  The Calif* refugees might have sent up the price of houses, but this came at the cost of lower apartment prices in Calif*.

 

Some notes for lions were once again the Trump years experiencing a flattening of wealth.  Was it because of Mr. T or lingering effects of the Obama years? 

 They tabulated Asians for the 1st time & found they have double the median income of any other group.

Why are so many asians desperate to come to a country with half the income that they make?  Give us your tired, your poor/your huddled masses, but mostly your money.  We need your money to pay off our debt.

 The big news was median net worth jumping 36% in 3 years.  The median for the lion generation is now $1/4 mil.  The median for asians is double any other group.  College degrees continue to earn 4x high school degrees.

A big question for lions is why asians are moving to a country which is so much poorer than they are.

 The top 10% club jumped from $1.4 mil to $1.9 mil after hovering near $1.4 mil for 15 years.  Most of that increase was from housing (page 14).

Stonk market participation exploded after 2019 (page 16), confirming lion beliefs that most animals poured money into stonks in the downturn of 2020, after 15 years of untradable conditions.  Having said that, the value of their stonk holdings didn't significantly increase, so they didn't time their trades very well.

Since it was manely fueled by a jump in housing & the jump in housing was from animals formerly concentrated in Calif* now being distributed throughout the country, it wasn't really $1.4 mil for 15 years.  That was a period when everyone was being told to move to Calif* or else.  

The biggest sign of a large scale return to offices would be a reduction in net worth.  Interest rates probably won't do it.

Important to note the survey is for families rather than just individuals, including the median income.  It doesn't report what individual net worth would be after a divorce.  Also suspect they're trying to boost the numbers as much as possible to downplay the national debt.  Chances of someone being in a dual income relationship & the women making at least 80% of the men go up as the percentiles increase so it's not impossible for lions to be pretty well off by confirmed bachelor standards.

Men cease to be the primary breadwinner above the 90th percentile.  The top 10% is comprised of dual incomes.  Below the 90th percentile, household net worth is the man's net worth.

 Lions would consider the survey the biggest piece of evidence for a short 1 & done inflation fight & return to stonks outpacing interest.  It clearly showed prices rising because of a 1 time migration of wealth out of Calif*.  Another possibility is that what drove high inflation in Calif* will continue driving nationwide inflation.  This seems less likely than a return to Calif*.

Based on the accepted minimums for retirement savings & the reported net worth curve, only the top 10% have any hope of ever retiring.  Lions consider this a remarkable failure of the financial system.  It might only be on par with feudalism.

 

The tube managed to break down the net worth survey by age.  Still just households rather than single lions living alone.  Those numbers doubled in the last 5 years alone because of the Calif* exodus.

Lions can expect to stay in the same percentile forever.  You can't really move up a percentile without a significantly higher paying job.  Investment luck, savings rate, & income are going to stay the same or lower for lions as their peers in the same percentile.

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The lion kingdom has grown increasingly skeptical of the Dave Ramsey system, manely the idea that the average 10% stonk returns over 30 years equate to a pure stonk portfolio generating 10% of its principle in disposable income every year.  If you burned 10% of a stonk portfolio from 2001-2011, it would have finished at 0.  The system doesn't factor in very long sideways & downward markets, long enough for a 10% annual drawdown to erase the entire portfolio.

It might work if the portfolio doubles before the 1st distribution & the distribution is 10% of the principal but maybe 5% of the total.  The reality continues to point to a traditional balance of stonks & bonds with just a tiny fraction of 10% being disposable or a pure stonk portfolio which grows significantly before the 1st distribution. 

Knowing this, is it now time to buy, hold, or sell?  Lions see manely a short term dip, maybe a big dip, from war & jawboning by the fed, but long term things being fairly priced for the kind of inflation the fed historically targeted.  Lions still see the fed holding at 3.5% inflation as they did before & quantitative tightening not continuing beyond the current level.

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Dreamed about climbing through a forest with an unknown heroine.  Then a fighter jet crashed just a few feet in front of us.  It was a sudden bright, loud explosion.  The immediate thought was to run away before something else crashed.