The Federal Reserve’s new Distributional Financial Accounts provide telling data on growing U.S. wealth and income inequality — Raksha Kopparam

Wealth disparities between the rich and the poor in the United States have broadened over the past 30 years, according to a new dataset released earlier this month by researchers at the Federal Reserve Board. Their Distributional Financial Accounts is the new dataset that provides quarterly estimates of wealth distribution in the country from 1989 to 2019. 2 The new dataset was created by integrating the Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Accounts with the Survey of Consumer Finances. Together, they contain reliable measures of the distribution of household-sector assets and liabilities from 1989, which gives policymakers and economists alike new insight into how the distribution of wealth has changed since the 1990s.

The new Federal Reserve Board dataset confirms that wealth concentration has been growing, consistent with other data series such as the World Inequality Database assembled by academics worldwide. Indeed, the Fed’s new Distributional Financial Accounts open up new opportunities to study close to real-time changes in the U.S. wealth distribution. It provides the necessary data to study fluctuations in the wealth distribution over short time periods, while accounting for changes that occur between times of survey measurement for less frequently collected datasets....

WCEG — The Equitablog
The Federal Reserve’s new Distributional Financial Accounts provide telling data on growing U.S. wealth and income inequality
Raksha Kopparam, Research Assistant at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth