Last week, another indication the US top-down economic recovery is also bottom heavy. Apparently, right now the only people enjoying anywhere near the Great American Dream are those who have already acquired it.

Median income for all US families fell 5 percent between 2010 and 2013. Except for those incomes in the high brackets — $200,000-plus — which rose 2 percent.
Ain’t that some shit?

(Illustration found here).

The Federal Board’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances, which seems to report on America’s economic standing from various different angles.
Numbers tell the whole-tale in the lede from a story on the survey at FiveThirtyEight:

In the three years following the end of the Great Recession, the typical American family’s income declined 5 percent, its wealth fell 2 percent, it saved no more for retirement, and it was saddled with even more student debt.
The only households to see income gains were the highest earners, and the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest widened.

And the young are taking the hit:

Thursday’s report provided yet more evidence that today’s young people risk becoming a “lost generation” economically.
The median family headed by someone under 35 earned $35,300 in 2013, down 6 percent from 2010 and down nearly 20 percent from 2001.
Those figures may understate the magnitude of the problem: Many young people are living with their parents because they can’t afford to strike out on their own; they aren’t included in the Fed’s figures because they don’t count as their own households.

The bottom is still sinking — from National Journal:

“This is a deeper balance-sheet recession than we had thought,” says Ray Boshara, director of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Homeownership rates fell, as did average net housing value.
Business ownership rates also declined, and the average value of businesses owned took a hit as well.
…
It’s not just that white families tend to have higher incomes.
It’s that they hold more of every asset—homes, businesses, stocks and bonds, retirement accounts.
As you can see in the chart above, income disparity has nothing on wealth disparity.
The survey’s bottom line: The most affluent families are recovering, but the bottom 90 percent are struggling.
In 2013, the top 3 percent of families held 54.4 percent of the nation’s wealth, up from 44.8 percent in 1989.

Meanwhile, today a report from Harvard Business School, which appears to copy the above, and is pretty grim, too.
Via International Business Times:

Overall, our “recovering” economy is doing just half its job, the survey found, as “the typical large or midsized firm in America is rallying or even prospering, as are highly skilled individuals. But many middle-and working-class citizens and small businesses are struggling.”
The study’s findings suggest that due to the dynamics of globalization and technological change in the U.S. economy, many of America’s challenges are caused by the nation’s own actions or lack thereof.
But the current wealth gap is “unsustainable,” and moving forward, there’s a need to “invest and set policies to make Americans so productive that they can command higher wages even in the face of these dynamics.”

But a troubling, though, correct take-away by respondents in the Harvard study that they “…were much more hopeful about the future competitive success of America’s firms than they were about the future pay of America’s workers.”

Living among the bottom feeders where there’s not much feed.