Wealth

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place. President Obama's economic advisers and outside experts say the nation's much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind , including young people looking to buy their first homes and...

Position: Greater Washington market president of Bank of America. As a child, it was Jeff Wood's dream to fly planes. When he entered the military, he became a flight officer and commander in the Navy. Looking to anchor down, he went to graduate school and when he left the service began working for Merrill Lynch as a financial adviser. He quickly built a large clientele, and began climbing the corporate ladder, until becoming managing director for the Washington area, after Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking...

WEALTH REGAINED: America has regained all the household wealth it lost in the Great Recession and then some, thanks to higher stock and home prices. But the average household still has a long way to go. RECOVERY: Household wealth jumped $3 trillion to $70 trillion in the January-March quarter. That topped the previous peak of $68 trillion in the third quarter of 2007, just before the recession began. RICH RICHER: Yet because of inflation and a rising population, the average household has...

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem. Bill Vaughan Please excuse the very wealthy for feeling a bit under siege lately. Taxes for the top 2 percent are very likely to go higher. Uncle Sam's share of capital gains and dividend income might rise, and means-testing for Social Security and Medicare is probable. In the United States, the very rich hold most of that wealth in dollars, which are worth increasingly less.

Which is the more redistributionist of our two parties? In recent decades, as Republicans have devoted themselves with laser-like intensity to redistributing America's wealth and income upward, the evidence suggests the answer is the GOP. The most obvious way that Republicans have robbed from the middle to give to the rich has been the changes they wrought in the tax code — reducing income taxes for the wealthy in the Reagan and George W. Bush...

I question John J. Gallagher's assertion that the cost of all the embellishments accompanying the sport of dressage [" It's the costs that matter ," Free for All, June 30] puts the Romneys "out of touch with everyday Americans" who might be struggling to make ends meet. It is as if to say that people of substantial means, by virtue of their fortunes, cannot have compassion for those less fortunate. Nonsense. Wealth does not preclude empathy. If that were the case, one would also have to have doubts about such famously rich...

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman listed between $15 million and $66 million in personal assets in a government filing released Friday. The former Utah governor has extensive holdings worth between $5 million and $25 million in Huntsman Corp., the family chemical company started by his billionaire father, Jon Sr. Huntsman has already given up to to $2 million to seed his campaign and may have to rely further on his personal wealth if his candidacy doesn't attract more momentum.

One night in Adams Morgan, the sons and daughters of lawyers and corporate executives padded into a friend's rowhouse for a kind of group therapy session about their families' wealth. They are young people who have inherited or stand to inherit big money, and they are spending their post-college years living modestly and working to address the needs of the poor, hungry and politically disadvantaged. But the privilege they grew up with and the money coming their way nag at them in ways few people not in their position can...

Regarding Harold Meyerson's Sept. 26 op-ed column, "Redistributing wealth upward" : Mr. Meyerson made a fascinating argument. He claimed that the only time in U.S. history that workers substantially benefited from productivity increases was during the three decades after World War II, a period characterized by union power and high marginal tax rates. Since then, he noted, wage rates have not matched productivity increases. At the same time,...

Most selective colleges, public and private, profess to seek a diverse class of students. But that is often an elusive goal. Sometime this month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on a suit challenging an affirmative action policy in Texas. At issue in Fisher v. University of Texas is whether a student's race or ethnicity can factor into admissions decisions. In 2003, when the court last ruled on the matter, it affirmed that student diversity is a compelling state interest that can...

American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth lost during the recession, leaving them without the spending power to fuel a robust economic recovery, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve. From the peak of the boom to the bottom of the bust, households watched a total of $16 trillion in wealth disappear amid sinking stock prices and the rubble of the real estate market. Since then, Americans have only been able to recapture 45 percent of that...

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney admitted to keeping assets in the Cayman Islands, money managers for the wealthy were not surprised. When it emerged that he had paid taxes at a lower rate than millions of Americans who earn far less, money managers yawned. But when they discovered that Romney held as much as $100 million in his IRA — the kind of retirement account to which most Americans can contribute only $5,500 per year — even the most sophisticated financial analysts ...

Much has been written attempting to explain the increasing gap between the economic haves and the have-nots, with the discussion often focusing on various federal policies. The April 27 front-page article " At work in the princess-industrial complex " suggests, however, an alternative explanation. Perhaps the ultra-wealthy play such a prominent role in our society because children are taught from the earliest ages to revere and idealize symbols of wealth, power and inequality. Bruce Levinson ,...

There's a surprisingly telling barometer of income disparity in the Washington region that rarely arises in conversations about the haves and have-nots. Trees. A clear fault line that begins at upper 16th Street in Northwest and follows the Potomac River south of the city separates leafy neighborhoods from communities with fewer trees, data on the region's tree canopy compiled by the University of Vermont's Spatial Analysis Laboratory and analyzed by The Washington Post show.

Wealth inequality widened dramatically during the first two years of the economic recovery, as the upper 7 percent of American households saw their average net worth increase 28 percent, while the wealth of the other 93 percent declined, according to a report released Tuesday. The study by the Pew Research Center underscored other data showing that the economic growth that has followed the Great Recession has benefited mainly those at the top. The uneven recovery has only...

PUTTAPARTHI, India — For centuries, their image was as barefoot ascetics who spent their lives in solitary Himalayan meditation. But now India's gurus, "miracle workers" and spiritual leaders, often collectively known as "godmen," have become savvy, powerful figures who control vast philanthropic and business empires, dabble in politics and manipulate the media. With that power and wealth, however, have come questions about the business of religion, fueled in recent months by the discoveries of hoards of gold, silver,...

Twice in the Sept. 20 newspaper, headlines misstated the concept of "wealth" and "earnings. " The front page led with "Obama lays out case for raising taxes on the rich," while Metro led with "D.C. set to raise taxes on wealthy. " In neither case were those taxes focused on wealth. "Wealth" is what you have, and it's measured at a single point in time. Property, real estate and capital gains taxes are all taxes on wealth. What President Obama and the D.C. Council were proposing (and the council has since...

PARIS — The wealthiest member of France's Socialist government, French people learned Monday, is Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who inherited a $7.8 million fortune from his family's trade in art and antiques. But Michele Delaunay, minister for the aged, also disclosed a comfortable stash: $7 million, mostly in inherited real estate along the Atlantic coast. Rich ministers and poor — all 38 members of President Francois Hollande's government — were required on Monday to declare their assets...