The Fed's 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance

Last week, the Federal Reserve released its latest triennial summary of the Survey of Consumer Finances . As Paul Krugman noted in his column in the New York Times this morning, "there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001."

Here's how the Fed put it in the introduction to this update of the SCF:

The survey shows that, over the 2004–07 period, the median value of real (inflation-adjusted) family in- come before taxes was little changed; median income had grown slightly in the preceding three-year period.

Noting that the SCF has typically underreported credit card debt, Adam Levitin writes on the Credit Slips blog:

Balances for revolvers grew by somewhere between a quarter and a third in three years. Wow. This bespeaks a rapid leveraging up in credit card debt for a large segement of Americans.