The Atlantic points out a chart in Bernanke’s report to Congress showing the mean ratio of Americans’ net worth to annual income. After bouncing around 5x for much of the early ’90s, it went well above 6x during the tech boom, dipped briefly, and then soared to 6.3x-ish in 2007 before plummeting to around 5x again today. The Fed report, and Daniel Indiviglio at the Atlantic, point to this as a key restraint on consumer spending, as consumer confidence won’t rebound until people have repaired their balance sheets.
Here at Dealbreaker we were more surprised that the ratio was so high, since we assumed that the average American didn’t have much in the way of net worth beyond a 47 inch flat screen, a Wendy’s Baconator Deluxe and an underwater mortgage. So we looked around for median data, assuming that the mean was dominated by the top and fluctuations are driven mostly by Tiger Woods’s property tax bills. And we put together a somewhat different chart, based on the Fed’s Chartbook, which is triennial and only goes through 2007 (and measures slightly different things from the report to Congress):
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Peterson
Derek Peterson spent nearly a decade working as an investment banker, most recently at Morgan Stanely. Peterson “always wanted to take a company public” but never found the right one. Then one day it hit him, like the sort of epiphany one gets when they’re really, really stoned– he would get into the business of getting people high. “The few dispensaries in my neighborhood — I started talking to them and found out they were doing $10 million to $14 million in business a year,” Peterson said. “I just started to see the economics.” Continue reading »
Howard would come home so stressed out that he’d go ballistic about tricycles in the driveway and toys on the floor, write Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson in “Spousonomics,” a geeky guide to finding marital bliss through economics. His tantrums had to go, as Howard always recognized after he calmed down. So he and his wife Jen, a fellow lawyer, sought ways to check his anger. Counting to 20 didn’t work. Nor did deep breathing. Desperate, they created a game in which Jen called out “Red Flag” whenever he looked ready to explode. “If Howard went three days without a red flag, she’d have sex with him,” the authors write. As puerile as that sounds, the game worked, restoring peace to their home and rekindling their sex life: A classic economic tradeoff, to hear Szuchman and Anderson tell it. Or was it a coup for a manipulative male? [Bloomberg]
