1,700 millionaires minted in US every day

new york — The US is home to a working class suffering from stagnant incomes and declining job prospects — widespread struggles that helped elect Republican Donald Trump. The relative wealth of Americans in all age groups keeps falling, compared with previous decades.

America has $55.6 trillion in private financial assets and more millionaires than any other nation in the world by far. Today, more than eight million households have financial assets of $1 million or more, not including homes or luxury goods, according to Boston Consulting Group. From 2010 to 2015, the number of millionaires jumped by 2.4 million. Another 3.1 million will be created by 2020, BCG estimates, at the pace of 1,700 new American millionaires every day.

The very oldest Americans hold a disproportionate chunk of all those trillions, and they’re handing it off to their already well-off kids in what is the largest generational transfer of wealth in history.

Inheritance is an increasingly significant driver of wealth in America. About three-quarters of the country are “strugglers”, unable to save anything from year to year, the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis concluded in a study. The other quarter of the country, however, are “thrivers”, the St Louis Fed said. These include the top one per cent.

Most of these thrivers, however, are members of a flourishing uppermiddle class. To be upper-middleclass, according to Urban Institute scholar Stephen Rose’s classification, a family of three must make at least $100,000 a year and less than $350,000, while a family of three in the mere middle class makes $50,000 to $100,000, and one in the lower-middle class earns $30,000 to $50,000.

It turns out that the number of upper-middle-class Americans has ballooned since 1979 while the other parts of the middle class were shrinking.

These upper-middle-class millionaires are far more privileged than 90 per cent of the country, but they rarely feel rich. They still need to borrow for a child’s college education, with the average, four-year, private-college tuition now at $33,480 a year. They need to worry about long-term-care expenses: A private room in a nursing room now costs $7,700 a month, according to Genworth Financial. — Bloomberg