We are told, endlessly, that a rising stock market is good news for everyone. When the Dow hits a new milestone—20,000, 30,000, take your pick—we are encouraged to cheer, to feel reassured, to believe that prosperity is spreading outward and downward like a benevolent tide. A rising market, we’re told, lifts all boats. It’s a comforting image. It’s also deeply misleading, because most people in the US don’t have a boat in that water at all.
The stock market is not a shared commons. It is a privately owned asset pool, and its ownership is astonishingly concentrated. The wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. households own roughly 92 percent of all stocks. Go further up the ladder and the picture becomes starker still: the top 1 percent alone owns about four out of every ten dollars in the stock market. For the bottom half of Americans, stock ownership is so small it is effectively nonexistent.
So when stock prices rise, who exactly is being lifted? Certainly not the 40 percent of Americans who struggle to afford at least one basic necessity—rent, food, or medical care. Not the 63 percent who couldn’t handle a $1,000 emergency room bill or a $500 car repair without going into debt. Not the 80 percent living paycheck to paycheck, with little margin for error and no surplus to invest. For these households, stock market gains don’t lift them upward. Instead, those gains quietly raise the floor beneath everyone else’s feet—making housing, healthcare, education, and even groceries more expensive relative to stagnant wages. The water rises, yes—but it rises against most of us.
When stock prices rise, roughly 96 percent of Americans see their share of total wealth decline
Research makes this dynamic explicit. When stock prices go up, roughly 96 percent of Americans actually see their share of total wealth decline. This isn’t because their lives suddenly worsen in absolute terms, but because wealth at the top grows so rapidly that everyone else falls behind by comparison. Inequality doesn’t require widespread impoverishment. It only requires acceleration at the top—and the stock market is remarkably efficient at providing exactly that. Among the top 10 percent of earners, rising stock prices are wildly beneficial. For the top 4 percent, they are transformative. Everyone else’s relative loss is their gain. When they win, we lose. In fact, their winning is dependent upon the rest of us losing.
This isn’t an accident. Over the last several decades, stock market growth has not primarily reflected explosive growth in the real economy. Instead, it has tracked a long, steady shift in how economic output is divided. A growing share of the nation’s wealth has flowed to capital—profits, dividends, asset appreciation—while a shrinking share has gone to labor in the form of wages. In plain language, the stock market’s long bull run has been fueled less by workers producing dramatically more value than by workers receiving a smaller piece of what they produce.
The overall economic pie has grown, but not especially fast. What has changed is who gets the slices. Those who own stocks—by definition, those with disposable income and existing wealth—have captured most of the gains. Those who rely primarily on wages have not. The stock market doesn’t merely reflect inequality; it actively helps generate it. And yet we continue to treat market highs as national achievements, as if they were collective victories rather than private windfalls.
The irony is impossible to ignore. The United States is, by almost any measure, the wealthiest nation in human history. In 2017, its GDP stood at $19.39 trillion—nearly double that of China, the world’s second-largest economy at the time. Projections put U.S. GDP above $23 trillion within a few years. By raw economic output, the country is fabulously rich. And yet a vast portion of its population is struggling to survive.
How can this be? How can so much wealth coexist with so much insecurity? The answer is not that the country lacks resources. It’s that those resources are increasingly locked away, accumulating at the top and compounding there. Wealth, once concentrated, has a tendency to stay concentrated. It earns returns. It buys influence. It gets passed down.
A rising stock market doesn’t signal shared prosperity—it signals who already owns the economy
Consider the extreme end of the spectrum. According to analyses based on Forbes’ annual list of the richest Americans, just three individuals—Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos—have held more wealth than the entire bottom half of the U.S. population combined. Three people versus roughly 160 million others. This isn’t merely a curiosity. It’s a signal of a system that no longer distributes gains broadly, even in times of apparent prosperity.
The story looks similar when viewed through the lens of race. In 2010, stocks made up about 18 percent of the total assets of white households, compared to just 5 percent for Black and Latino households. When stock prices rise, the benefits flow disproportionately along existing racial lines, deepening gaps that have been centuries in the making.
Workers didn’t stop creating value. We simply stopped receiving a fair share of it.
The stock market doesn’t just reward wealth—it rewards having wealth already. People earning over $100,000 a year are far more likely to have money left over to invest. People earning under $30,000—nearly half of American workers—generally do not. You cannot dollar-cost average your way into financial security if every dollar you earn is already spoken for.
This reality is thrown into sharp relief by comparisons that are almost obscene in their imbalance. In 2016, Wall Street banks paid out more than $24 billion in bonuses to about 177,000 employees. That single bonus pool exceeded the combined annual earnings of over a million Americans working full-time at the federal minimum wage.
Redirected even briefly, that same pool of money could have raised millions of low-wage workers—restaurant servers, home health aides, fast-food workers—to $15 an hour. Instead, it flowed upward, reinforcing a system where financial success feeds primarily on itself.
Much of this wealth is not newly earned in any meaningful sense. The three wealthiest families in the United States—the Waltons, the Mars family, and the Kochs—built their fortunes generations ago. Today, stock ownership and business equity preserve and magnify that inheritance. The stock market does not level the playing field; it freezes the hierarchy and then amplifies it.
When we cheer rising stock prices, we are applauding a private windfall and calling it a public victory
So when we cheer rising stock prices, what are we really celebrating? We are celebrating the further swelling of already massive portfolios. We are applauding a mechanism that channels economic growth toward those least in need of it. We are mistaking asset inflation for shared prosperity and calling it success. Treating the stock market as a proxy for national well-being is not just inaccurate—it's dangerous because it obscures hardship, excuses inequality, and allows us to congratulate ourselves while millions of people fall further behind.
A rising tide does lift boats—but only the boats already afloat. For everyone else, it simply raises the water and calls it progress.
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