Our Plutocracy: A Sobering New Portrait

Never before, at least not in the lifetime of any American now living, have so few made so much at the expense of so many. A look at just-released IRS data at the staggeringly high incomes of our top 400.

In a Lost Decade, We Had Big Winners

By nearly every measure, average Americans lost ground in the ‘Aughts.’ They’ve been losing ground — to the rich — for three full decades now. Will the ‘Teens’ make that four?

America's Greediest: The 2009 Top Ten

Who deserves to sit on this year’s list of our most avaricious? We could pick ten eminently deserving greedy straight from any big bank on Wall Street. But why spoil all the fun?

The 2009 Forbes 400: The What-Me-Worry Gang

An average American family would have to work thousands of years to amass a billion-dollar fortune. America’s super rich, the new data on our richest 400 make clear, can lose a billion and barely notice.

GDP: Taking Aim at the Stat that Bamboozles

A conservative world leader and two world-famous economists who challenge conservative world leaders have joined up to call for a totally new global economic yardstick. And they want that yardstick to measure inequality.

A New Profile of America’s ‘Top-Heaviest’ Year

In 2007, the year before the Great Recession began, America’s super rich partied — as never before. The evidence? We look at the year’s freshly crunched income numbers.

For the World’s Wealthy, A Setback Most Slight

The global economic collapse, says the first in-depth survey of grand fortune since last September, has left the world’s wealth just as intensely concentrated as ever.

Pondering Our Most Puzzling Inequality Stat

Families in the nation’s top 1 percent are grabbing a rising share of the nation’s income. So why do newly released Federal Reserve numbers show no jump in their share of the nation’s wealth?

‘Hard Times’ on Billionaire Boulevard

The world’s super rich, says the latest snapshot of global wealth, have lost humungous sums over the past year. Have billionaires, as some observers claim, now ’suffered’ their way back to the rest of us?

America’s Bubble Economy: A Last Look Back?

Federal Reserve researchers have just delivered up a data dump that offers a cautionary tale — on inequality — that average families everywhere ought never forget.