Whither Goeth the Wealth?

In his March 10 speech, Schwarzman said he saw hope in the Treasury Department’s unfolding plan to create a “bad bank” that would buy up toxic assets from commercial banks using public and private money. In a series of talks over the past week, Sheila Bair, the chair of the FDIC, said the proper term for this private/public “bad” bank should be “aggregator bank,” that the program would be administered under TARP, and predicted that Treasury Secretary Geithner would announce such a plan “within the next few weeks.”

Another report detailed the loss of wealth among the, umm, wealthy. Spectrem Group reported March 11 that the number of U.S. households with more than $1 million in assets, not including their primary residence, fell 27% in 2008 to 6.7 million, down from a record 9.2 million in 2007. The number of pentamillionaires–those with more than $5 million in assets–fell 28%, to 840,000, from 1.16 million in 2007.

In its annual listing of the richest of the rich, Forbes magazine reported that Bill Gates, No. 1 on the billionaires’ list, saw his wealth decline $18 billion to only $40 billion in 2008, while Warren Buffett’s fortune fell $25 billion, to $37 billion.