Monterey, CA Economic Growth : The Rich Versus The Poor

View From A Non-Profit Serving Seniors In Carmel, Carmel Valley, Gonzalez, Greenfield, King City, Marina, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, Salinas, Seaside and Soledad California

I've written many times on my blog that despite the fact that the stock market is booming (with the exception of today when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 208 points), many seniors are still struggling to get by.  And it's not just seniors.  A report in today's Wall Street Journal said that, according to the Federal Reserve Bank, Americans have only recovered 45% of the wealth they lost during the recession.  The St. Louis branch of the Fed launched a new division called the Center for Household Financial Stability which will track this statistic on a regular basis.  They noted something that I have been writing about for some time, the fact that most of the recovery in net worth has been tied to the stock market and is concentrated in holdings of wealthy families.  "Considering the uneven recovery of wealth across households, a conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified," said a report from the Federal Reserve Bank.  Another report, also in today's Wall Street Journal, said that disposable personal income was down 3.3% last year, the worst numbers which have been reported since the government tracked this metric (in 1959) with the one exception of 2009.  The problem for seniors, in my view, is many got burned so badly during the crash that they pulled their money out at the worst possible time and missed the subsequent boom.  With interest rates near historic lows, payments from CD's, T-bills, etc., are amounting to almost nothing.  There's no clear solution in sight, and I can only hope that some of Governor Jerry Brown's budget surplus goes to restore service programs which were cut that helped senior citizens.