As I mentioned again the other day, focusing on cleaning up Wall Street and helping normal Americans instead of the coddled bunch who created the problem ought to be the primary focus. Elizabeth Warren is a good start but Obama needs to be much, much more aggressive with fixing this. Households are too reliant on a functioning Wall Street to play around with this any longer.
The decline in net worth underscores how dependent families' wealth is on stock investments. About a fifth of total household financial assets are in stock-market holdings. The value of households' stock portfolios dropped to $6.8 trillion last quarter -- a 12 percent decline from the first three months of this year.
Americans' home equity isn't making up for the loss in their stock values. Last quarter, U.S. real estate values ticked up a scant 0.3 percent compared with the January-March quarter.
And many economists expect the home market to weaken further now that a federal home buyer tax credit has expired. Most economists expect home prices to decline around 5 percent to 10 percent by the middle of next year.
