"You don't want those kinds of riots here," said Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.
On the surface, inequality might appear to be a problem of the have-nots. Yet the haves will suffer, too. Barry Ritholtz, CEO of the investment research firm Fusion IQ, says millions of potential investors may conclude, as they did following the Great Depression, that the stock market is a rigged game for insiders.
Such seismic shifts in popular sentiment can have lasting effects. The Dow Jones Industrial Average didn't regain its September 1929 peak of 355.95 until the same month in 1954.
"You're going to lose an entire generation of investors," says Ritholtz. "And that's how you end up with a 25-year bear market. That's the risk if people start to think there is no economic justice."
Rising inequality contributed to the onset of previous financial crises and may already be laying the groundwork for the next one, some economists say.
During both the 1920s and the most recent decade, the rich enjoyed large income gains, much of which were made available to the working poor and middle class via credit channels. Politicians encouraged the resort to credit as a way to bridge the gap for those struggling to sustain living standards amid flatlining wage income, according to Rajan's 2010 book "Fault Lines."
As a result, household debt nearly doubled in both periods, setting the stage for the Great Depression and the most recent financial crisis, says a December 2010 paper by economists Michael Kumhof and Romain Ranciere of the IMF. That increasing debt burden left the economy exposed to widespread defaults when a financial shock hit.
For many consumers, easy access to credit today is a thing of the past. Government fiscal policy -- in the form of payroll tax cuts and transfer payments -- is filling the gap between income and consumption the way easy credit did during the boom years.
"The missing credit temporarily is being filled in by fiscal measures," said Feroli. "But we have yet to understand or see how a post-leverage, post-fiscal support household sector will behave."
The government's response to the financial crisis may also have exacerbated the rich-poor gap by shifting liabilities from private banks to taxpayers. Households and businesses have trimmed their debts since the 2008 peak while government borrowing -- to recapitalize the nation's banks and battle the recession -- has exploded.