Bloomberg Businessweek June 29, 2020 pp25-26 “The Americans Left Out of the Boom” “The compound gains of equities are also compounding racial and economic inequality”
Facts presented in the article.
Households holding stocks: 61% of White, 31% of Black, 26% of Hispanic.
Stock Market Gains from Buybacks and Dividends 2005-2019. Whites 72-fold greater than Hispanic and 100-fold greater than Black families.
“The bottom 50% of Americans in terms of wealth distribution saw their wealth shrink by 15% of its 2007 level by 2016, primarily because of the drop in residential real estate values. The top 10% emerged relatively unscathed thanks to equity gains”
Summary
Financial markets are not democracies they are “dollar-weighted counting machine, where investors’ views are weighted by how much money they have to invest”.
John Rogers, “founder of Ariel Investments, one of the biggest Black-owned investment companies” states “We don’t have grandfathers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles that have been teaching us about the markets as we grow up and how to get comfortable in the wealth that can be created in the stock market”. “And if we’re not fully participants in the capitalist democracy, it just compounds and compounds and compounds and creates the kind of frustration that you’re seeing in the street”.
Raphael Bostic, “the first Black Fed president in the central bank’s 106 -year history” is calling for action for creating more opportunity for minorities and the poor.
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