WASHINGTON (AP) — The average U.S. household has a long way to go to recover the wealth it lost to the recession, a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis concludes.
The typical household has regained less than half its lost wealth, the analysis says. That's far below the estimate in a Federal Reserve report in March that calculated that Americans as a whole had regained 91 percent of their losses.
Household wealth plunged $16 trillion from the third quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2009. By the final three months of 2012, American households as a group had regained $14.7 billion.
Yet once those figures are adjusted for inflation and population growth, the average household has recovered only 45 percent of its wealth, the St. Louis Fed concludes.