By Cora Lewis, Associated Press

NEW YORK — A strong performance in financial markets, particularly an outsize gain for the stock market in 2021, helped entrench existing trends of wealth inequality during the pandemic, new data released this week show.

According to a report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the real net worth of white individuals outgrew that of Black and Hispanic individuals by 30 percentage points and 9 percentage points respectively, from the first quarter of 2019 through the second quarter of 2023.

The period featured a remarkable level of government financial support and, after the initial shock of the pandemic, a surprisingly strong job market. The unemployment rate for Black Americans in particular is now at 5.3%, near a record low, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 3.7%. Earnings for the typical Black full-time worker are now up 7.1%.

Closing the wealth gap is more difficult because a significantly larger number of white households traditionally have money in stocks and mutual funds. A separate Fed survey shows that as of 2022, about 65.6% of white households had investments in stocks, compared with 28.3% for Hispanic households and 39.2% for Black households.

"The study really shows the difference between making gains when it comes to income, and closing that gap, versus when it comes to wealth," said Janelle Jones, vice president of policy and advocacy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

While government support such as increased unemployment benefits and stimulus checks helped stave off a COVID-induced recession, financial asset prices rose so significantly with the reopening of the economy through 2021 that racial wealth disparities increased. And while those market-linked assets did fall in 2022 when the Federal Reserve rapidly increased interest rates, "those declines did not fully offset the earlier rises," according to the New York Fed.

"Much of the divergence in net worth by race and ethnicity since 2019 can be attributed to divergence in the real values of financial asset holdings," wrote the report's authors — including the fact that Black households have more wealth concentrated in pensions than in stocks, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.

https://www.ksl.com/article/50873827/wealth-disparities-by-race-grew-during-the-pandemic-despite-income-gains-report-shows