Black economic gains reversed in Great Recession | Hacker News Reader

Black economic gains reversed in Great Recession

finance.yahoo.com

9 pointshezekiah10 comments

Misleading statistic alert: Super rich people happen to be white.

Come on folks, something usable in a statistic that doesn't just make us groan.

Learn the difference between median and average. It will change your life. :-)

Yup. The concept of the median and percentiles is flabbergasting to people who've not heard of averages other than the mean.

Er, um...he was suggesting you learn the difference, but I think you simply did not read the article carefully enough. The statistics are not misleading, as the article properly uses the median, not the mean.

Lets not turn a class issue into a racial issue, while the stats are true, that $1 of white household wealth falls to very few white families (primarily the Goldmans, Sachs, Morgans, Bushes, etc). In 2008 the US decided that those that pay tax (those who work) should bail out those who do not (those who are rich).

Why not have a trickle up effect where the gov't lets people stay in their homes, and tells the banks to eat it, and folds them up because they didn't meet their capital requirements.

Why should we let real people go bankrupt and bail out fictional entities. If there is money for JP Morgan, AIG and GS there is money for the people mentioned in the article. Open up the Fed Discount Window to real people and close it to the banksters.

I prefer a different trickle up effect. Instead of letting irresponsible home buyers remain in their homes, why not redistribute those homes to responsible renters who wanted to buy but couldn't afford at bubble prices?

This helps the same number of people, but avoids the moral hazard that your scheme creates.

The moral hazard of a bank bailout, protecting people against being shot in the street for losing all of someone savings, the lying on loan applications encouraged by bank officers, the promises of low fixed rate permanent loans/re-fi that never materialized, the shoddily done foreclosure apps, the false bundling of securities?

Sounds like "letting judges adjust the principle on mortgages" is step one to avoiding that moral hazard. Hopefully we don't have people feeling strongly enough about moral hazard that they shoot the guys who sold the "safe" investments in Mortgage backed securities.

Not quite accurate, read the article:

"By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median black net worth had fallen 83 percent to $2,170"

That's MEDIAN, not AVERAGE. Average is even worse, as you say drawn up by the few very wealthy. But with median, the wealth disparity is already astounding. It's a racial issue. We can debate the reasons, but the fact remains. Middle class and even lower class white households still have much more wealth on average than their black counterparts in the same income group.

Well, the crazy thing is that the 83 percent drop would suggest that the median black net worth pre-2009 would be ~$5000.

Sorry for my bad English. I am Ukrainian.

There is no such thing as "money for people". Money is used to account wealth, which is created by people.

If you are producing something, you can increase production or you can increase count ("money"). You propose to increase count.

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