NEW YORK — The United States has reached a landmark economic milestone: the number of American millionaires has hit an all-time record high, a development economists are calling “historic,” “remarkable,” and “a finding that will read very differently depending on which paragraph of this article you stop reading at.”
The surge in millionaire wealth follows years of market gains, sustained asset appreciation, and the continued upward redistribution of financial good fortune toward people who already had some — a process economists refer to as “the market working as designed,” which is not inaccurate and is also not entirely comforting.
“This is fantastic news,” said wealth analyst Chandler Fitch of the Financial Prosperity Institute, an organization funded by people who have already made it. “More millionaires than ever means more prosperity, more investment, more economic activity. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to take this call from my accountant about sheltering some of that prosperity in a structure that is entirely legal and that I am not going to describe in detail.”
The milestone arrives simultaneously with a separate, related finding: rising costs continue to “chip away” at the value of Americans’ nest eggs, with inflation in housing, food, healthcare, and the general concept of sustaining a life eroding purchasing power at a pace described by financial advisors as “concerning” and by everyone else as “yes, I know, I’ve been at the grocery store.”
Tesla added a note of corporate whimsy to the week’s economic landscape by beating first-quarter earnings expectations while simultaneously warning that planned capital expenditures will drive negative cash flow — a sentence that means the company made more money than expected and is also spending more money than it has, a situation familiar to most Americans, though typically without the earnings beat component and with considerably fewer electric vehicles involved.
“We are in an extremely strong position,” said a Tesla spokesperson, who then read a prepared list of forward-looking statement disclaimers so lengthy that the strong position appeared, by the conclusion, to be seated and slightly tired.
California contributed its own economic data point this week, having added 677,000 housing units while its population grew by only 39,000 — and yet vacancy rates remain tight, suggesting the new units are either very expensive, located somewhere structurally inconvenient, or have been purchased as investment properties, which brings us directly back to the millionaire record at the top of this article in a way that is entirely coincidental.
A Nobel-winning economist also weighed in, warning that artificial intelligence threatens “jobs with dignity” — a phrase that implies there are currently jobs without dignity, which anyone who has worked in food service, corporate open-plan offices, or content moderation has understood for some time and did not require a Nobel Prize to confirm.
Mortgage rates have dipped below 6% again, which financial experts say presents an excellent opportunity for the record number of Americans who have recently become millionaires.
Globe News Daily’s financial advice: you probably have enough fiber but not enough savings. We cannot advise you on which of these is the more urgent problem, as we are a satire publication and not a licensed financial institution, though we would like to be.
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