Households turned to stepped-up borrowing to help make ends meet, until that avenue was shut off by the collapse of house prices. About 10.8 million homeowners still owed more money on their mortgages than their properties were worth in the third quarter, according to Seattle-based Zillow Inc.
The fallout has made many Americans less inclined to take risks. The quits rate -- the proportion of Americans in the workforce who voluntarily left their jobs -- stood at 1.7 percent in October. While that’s up from 1.5 percent a year earlier, it’s below the 2.2 percent average for 2006, the year house prices started falling, government data show.
Household Formation
Millennials -- adults aged 18 to 32 -- are still slow to set out on their own more than four years after the recession ended, according to an Oct. 18 report by the Pew Research Center in Washington. Just over one in three head their own households, close to a 38-year low set in 2010.
Obama has proposed a raft of policies to attack the widening wage gap -- from simplifying the tax code and increasing exports to enhancing worker training and boosting pre-kindergarten education. Yet in a divided Washington he hasn’t made much progress pushing them through.
The president’s renewed focus on income inequality has more to do with politics than policy, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a self-described center- right institute in Washington.
Demagoguing Inequality
“It’s great politics to demagogue income distribution and complain about the rich getting ahead and the poor falling behind,” said Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director. “The substance of what he’s actually done doesn’t match the enormity of the problem as he’s portrayed it.”
The wage-gap debate has reverberated to other parts of Washington, as the SEC published a rule Sept. 18 that would compel public companies to reveal pay ratios between chief executives and their employees. While businesses have decried the requirement as overreach, some investors welcome the data as a way to help assess a company’s health.
“Income inequality and a shrinking middle class are real and important issues that our country needs to address,” Michael J. Sacks, chief executive officer of Chicago-based Grosvenor Capital Management, which oversees $23.8 billion in assets, said in a comment letter to the agency. The pay ratio data “can be helpful in allowing investors to more accurately judge the effect of pay structure on company performance, inform investors’ votes on executive pay and help regulators.”