Firstly, as my clients know, I do not integrate politics and finance together. Why? When it comes to personal finance, isn’t it about your money first?

Thus, looking at the ending of this last decade, how are we doing? And if you wanted to play politics, who would have the answer?

While many yell “fake news,” I tell my clients, “then try to read all news.”

So, when you read stats from The U.S. Department of Labor, Goldman Sachs, Federal Reserve Bank, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Wealth Management Magazine, for example ( I’ll presume these are mostly real news sources), we can now look at the last decade a bit closer.

From 2010 to 2019, this economy and politics belongs to Presidents Barack Obama and Trump.

So, as a nation, how did we do for the last 10 years? And is this a preview for the beginning of the next decade:

We Have Seen In The Financial Service Representation Industry: 
Advisory Growth of +20
Agents and Brokers -20%

The U.S. Workforce:
The number of unionized workers is -20%
Wages +10%
Job openings +200%
employment +160%

The Financial Markets
S&P stock index up 211%
Technology stocks up 311%
U.S. 10 year bonds up 50%
Gold up 42%
GDP Growth  47%

Assets & Income:
Net Worth of Households up 80%
Household Income up 10%
Minimum wage up 10%
Average income of wage earners top 20% of U.S. is 30%

So in short, we are having more fiduciary advisers helping people while U.S. employment has been booming, but not really translating into wages.

The financial markets are kicking butt, especially for retirement accounts. But as job growth is booming, wages are not, except for the top 20% of our society’s wage earners. And if you look a bit closer, that’s not true as well.

With ten years of inflation at 30% (3% per year), the top 20% of our society is just breaking even.

So where’s the money growth? Household assets. This includes retirement accounts.

So is that old saying true? Did the rich get richer the last 10 years? Did most of America get poorer the last 10 years?

I’ll let you be the judge of that. Just remember, when you start to place blame, blame Obama and Trump