You're right, I don't see much correlation between public debt and private wealth. As you can see from the following graph, the decline in household wealth was due chiefly to a decline in equities and pensions and, looking at the entire period from 1994 to 2002, real per-capita wealth continued to increase:
The actual numbers and sources are at http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/worth.html.
Cheers, and don't forget to vote!
Thanks, I remembered. Hope you did as well!
Which brings us back a month ago when I came in to your chat with olderwiser when I said (in post 190) "that tax-cuts haven't kept things from getting better."
I like your idea of 'core wealth' vs 'volatile asset prices'; kind of like 'core inflation'. There's a problem with the fact that stocks and land only leave you us an apple core of just a fifth of our assets, while taking out food and energy from price indexes only removed a fifth of the basket of purchases.
But hey, maybe we can include a moving average of land and stock prices --the reasoning can be that people own pension funds and land over several years.
We got possibilities here...