America Is Minting Lots of Cash-Strapped Millionaires

At the height of the Gilded Age, there were 4,047 millionaires in the US, according to an 18-month investigation by the long-gone New-York Tribune, which listed each by name in a special edition published in 1892.

Today the number of millionaire households is more than 24 million, or almost one in five US households, according to a Bloomberg analysis of government survey data through 2023. Fully a third of those modern millionaires have been minted since 2017, as home values and the stock market surged.

That doesn’t mean they’re walking around flush with cash.

Instead, more and more of millionaires’ wealth ...