Market’s record highs don’t help many American households at all

The Dow Jones industrial average is poised to hit a record high of 25,000 points this week, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 indexes similarly reaching new heights.

The indexes are widely used as a kind of shorthand for American economic health, appearing everywhere from nightly newscasts to President Donald Trump's tweets.

But for many, perhaps most, American households, those indexes measure an economy far removed from their own daily bread-and-butter concerns.

One figure from a recent working paper by New York University economist Edward Wolff illustrates that point: Fewer than 14 percent of American households directly own stock in any company.

Even when you consider indirect ownership via 401(k) retirement accounts and similar vehicles, fewer than half of American households own any stock at all.

Up until the early 2000s, stock ownership had been on the rise. From 1989 to 2001, the percentage of households directly owning stock rose from 13.1 to 21.3 percent, while the percent owning any stock - including indirect ownership via 401(k)s - increased from 31.7 to 51.9 percent, per Wolff's analysis.

But since then, stock ownership has declined. The share of households directly owning stock in 2016 - 13.9 percent - is similar to the share in the early 1990s.

The total rate of stock ownership, including indirect holdings, has fallen too but by a slighter amount, owing to the continued popularity of 401(k) retirement plans.

As with income and wealth, stock ownership is heavily concentrated in the uppermost echelons of the economy. The bottom 60 percent of households combined own just 1.8 percent of American stock. The top 1 percent, by contrast, owns over 40 percent of the country's stock, up from 34 percent in 2001.

Looked at another way, the top 20 percent of wealthy households - those with an average net worth of $3 million - own well over 90 percent of the American stock market.