Last edited Sun Feb 9, 2020, 09:14 PM - Edit history (1)
https://money.com/stock-ownership-10-percent-richest/
“Despite the fact that almost half of all households owned stock shares either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trusts, or various pension accounts, the richest 10% of households controlled 84% of the total value of these stocks in 2016,” Wolff writes.
emphasis on the word "indirectly". (but read on, where in the NBER paper, defined benefit pension plans are apparently excluded, but will have to read a little more)
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-biggest-bull-market-ever-yet-disaster-looms-for-millions-of-retirees-2019-07-18
https://www.nber.org/papers/w24085.pdf
EDITED - Just flying through the last link searching on the word "pension", but not doing any more reading for context --
Hit #5, p. 6 -
Also excluded here is the value of future Social Security benefits the family may receive upon retirement (usually referred to as "Social Security wealth" ), as well as the value of retirement benefits
from defined benefit pension plans ("DB pension wealth" ). Even though these funds are a source of
future income to families, they are not in their direct control and cannot be marketed.
Hit #56, p. 35 -
However, a full appraisal of retirement preparedness would also require a consideration of defined benefit pensions and Social Security.
It appears that "pension" in his statistic only covers Defined Contribution plans (e.g. 401k's), not what I think of as a pension at all. I have never heard the word pension applied to 401k or Defined Contribution plans before.
That said, how many people are covered by traditional pensions (defined benefit) anymore? And the majority who are fortunate enough to have pensions probably also own stocks by other means (401k's, IRAs, mutual funds, direct stock ownership) that are covered by his statistic.
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