All the notes were taken directly from the source mentioned.
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Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.
People from different generations, raised by different parents who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, experiencing different job markets with different incentives and different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons.
I can read about what it was like to lose everything during the Great Depression. But I don’t have the emotional scars of those who actually experienced it.
We all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it.
The economists wrote: “Our findings suggest that individual investors’ willingness to bear risk depends on personal history.”
Take stocks. If you were born in 1970, the S&P 500 increased almost 10-fold, adjusted for inflation, during your teens and 20s. That’s an amazing return. If you were born in 1950, the market went literally nowhere in your teens and 20s adjusted for inflation.
If you were born in 1960s America, inflation during your teens and 20s-your young, impressionable years when you’re developing a base of knowledge about how the economy works-sent prices up more than threefold. That’s a lot. You remember gas lines and getting paychecks that stretched noticeably less far than the ones before them. But if you were born in 1990, inflation has been so low for your whole life that it’s probably never crossed your mind.
…every financial decision a person makes, makes sense to them in that moment and checks the boxes they need to check. They tell themselves a story about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and that story has been shaped by their own unique experiences.
Those buying $400 in lottery tickets are by and large the same people who say they couldn’t come up with $400 in an emergency. They are blowing their safety nets on something with a one-in-millions chance of hitting it big.
We live paycheck-to-paycheck and saving seems out of reach. Our prospects for much higher wages seem out of reach. We can’t afford nice vacations, new cars, health insurance, or homes in safe neighborhoods. We can’t put our kids through college without crippling debt. Much of the stuff you people who read finance books either have now, or have a good chance of getting, we don’t. Buying a lottery ticket is the only time in our lives we can hold a tangible dream of getting the good stuff that you already have and take for granted. We are paying for a dream, and you may not understand that because you are already living a dream. That’s why we buy more tickets than you do.
Before World War II most Americans worked until they died. That was the expectation and the reality. The labor force participation rate of men age 65 and over was above 50% until the 1940s:
The 401(k)-the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement-did not exist until 1978. The Roth IRA was not born until 1998.
The share of Americans over age 25 with a bachelor’s degree has gone from less than 1 in 20 in 1940 to 1 in 4 by 2015.
The average college tuition over that time rose more than fourfold adjusted for inflation. Something so big and so important hitting society so fast explains why, for example, so many people have made poor decisions with student loans over the last 20 years. There is not decades of accumulated experience to even attempt to learn from.
Same for index funds, which are less than 50 years old. And hedge funds, which didn’t take off until the last 25 years. Even widespread use of consumer debt-mortgages, credit cards, and car loans-did not take off until after World War II, when the GI Bill made it easier for millions of Americans to borrow.
The world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts.
The cover of Forbes magazine does not celebrate poor investors who made good decisions but happened to experience the unfortunate side of risk. But it almost certainly celebrates rich investors who made OK or even reckless decisions and happened to get lucky.
If we had a magic wand we would find out exactly what proportion of these outcomes were caused by actions that are repeatable, versus the role of random risk and luck that swayed those actions one way or the other.
The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.
Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.
Focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.
The more extreme the outcome, the less likely you can apply its lessons to your own life, because the more likely the outcome was influenced by extreme ends of luck or risk.
The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor.
The role of risk means we should forgive ourselves and leave room for understanding when judging failures.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have ‚Ķ enough.”
The question we should ask of both Gupta and Madoff is why someone worth hundreds of millions of dollars would be so desperate for more money that they risked everything in pursuit of even more.
There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.
The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.
It gets dangerous when the taste of having more-more money, more power, more prestige-increases ambition faster than satisfaction.
Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.
Social comparison is the problem here.
The point is that the ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit it. Which means it’s a battle that can never be won, or that the only way to win is to not fight to begin with-to accept that you might have enough, even if it’s less than those around you.
“Enough” is realizing that the opposite-an insatiable appetite for more-will push you to the point of regret.
There are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain.
Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Family and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who you want to love you is invaluable. Happiness is invaluable. And your best shot at keeping these things is knowing when it’s time to stop taking risks that might harm them. Knowing when you have enough.
If something compounds-if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth-a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic.
Buffett’s fortune isn’t due to just being a good investor, but being a good investor since he was literally a child.
As I write this Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday. $81.5 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s.
Buffett began serious investing when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 30 he had a net worth of $1 million, or $9.3 million adjusted for inflation.¹⁶
From 1950 to 1990 we gained 296 megabytes. From 1990 through today we gained 100 million megabytes.
The timing was different, but Germansky and Livermore shared a character trait: They were both very good at getting wealthy, and equally bad at staying wealthy.
Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another.
Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.
The ability to stick around for a long time, without wiping out or being forced to give up, is what makes the biggest difference.
A good plan doesn’t pretend this weren’t true; it embraces it and emphasizes room for error. The more you need specific elements of a plan to be true, the more fragile your financial life becomes. If there’s enough room for error in your savings rate that you can say, “It’d be great if the market returns 8% a year over the next 30 years, but if it only does 4% a year I’ll still be OK,” the more valuable your plan becomes.
Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right. Room for error-often called margin of safety-is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance.
A barbelled personality-optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future-is vital.
Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery.
Forty percent of all Russell 3000 stock components lost at least 70% of their value and never recovered over this period. Effectively all of the index’s overall returns came from 7% of component companies that outperformed by at least two standard deviations.
The Russell 3000 has increased more than 73-fold since 1980. That is a spectacular return. That is success. Forty percent of the companies in the index were effectively failures. But the 7% of components that performed extremely well were more than enough to offset the duds. Just like Heinz Berggruen, but with Microsoft and Walmart instead of Picasso and Matisse. Not only do a few companies account for most of the market’s return, but within those companies are even more tail events. In 2018, Amazon drove 6% of the S&P 500’s returns. And Amazon’s growth is almost entirely due to Prime and Amazon Web Services, which itself are tail events in a company that has experimented with hundreds of products, from the Fire Phone to travel agencies. Apple was responsible for almost 7% of the index’s returns in 2018. And it is driven overwhelmingly by the iPhone, which in the world of tech products is as tail-y as tails get. And who’s working at these companies? Google’s hiring acceptance rate is 0.2%. Facebook’s is 0.1%. Apple’s is about 2%. So the people working on these tail projects that drive tail returns have tail careers.
The idea that a few things account for most results is not just true for companies in your investment portfolio. It’s also an important part of your own behavior as an investor.
Over the course of your lifetime as an investor the decisions that you make today or tomorrow or next week will not matter nearly as much as what you do during the small number of days-likely 1% of the time or less-when everyone else around you is going crazy.
There were 1,428 months between 1900 and 2019. Just over 300 of them were during a recession. So by keeping her cool during just the 22% of the time the economy was in or near a recession, Sue ends up with almost three-quarters more money than Jim or Tom.
A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy.
Part of why this isn’t intuitive is because in most fields we only see the finished product, not the losses incurred that led to the tail-success product.
The good jokes I see on Netflix are the tails that stuck out of a universe of hundreds of attempts.
Warren Buffett said he’s owned 400 to 500 stocks during his life and made most of his money on 10 of them.
“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
If there’s a common denominator in happiness-a universal fuel of joy-it’s that people want to control their lives.
The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless.
Doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.
Derek Sivers, a successful entrepreneur, once wrote about a friend who asked him to tell the story about how he got rich: I had a day job in midtown Manhattan paying $20 k per year-about minimum wage … I never ate out, and never took a taxi. My cost of living was about $1000/month, and I was earning $1800/month. I did this for two years, and saved up $12,000. I was 22 years old. Once I had $12,000 I could quit my job and become a full-time musician. I knew I could get a few gigs per month to pay my cost of living. So I was free. I quit my job a month later, and never had a job again. When I finished telling my friend this story, he asked for more. I said no, that was it. He said, “No, what about when you sold your company?” I said no, that didn’t make a big difference in my life. That was just more money in the bank. The difference happened when I was 22.¬≤‚Å∂
Median family income adjusted for inflation was $29,000 in 1955.¬≤ In 2019 it was just over $62,000. We’ve used that wealth to live a life hardly conceivable to the 1950s American, even for a median family. The median American home increased from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,436 square feet in 2018. The average new American home now has more bathrooms than occupants. Our cars are faster and more efficient, our TVs are cheaper and sharper.
When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?
If your job is to build cars, there is little you can do when you’re not on the assembly line. You detach from work and leave your tools in the factory. But if your job is to create a marketing campaign-a thought-based and decision job-your tool is your head, which never leaves you. You might be thinking about your project during your commute, as you’re making dinner, while you put your kids to sleep, and when you wake up stressed at three in the morning.
What do we do about that? It’s not an easy problem to solve, because everyone’s different. The first step is merely acknowledging what does, and does not, make almost everyone happy.
In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote: No one-not a single person out of a thousand-said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want. No one-not a single person-said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success. No one-not a single person-said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power. What they did value were things like quality friendships, being part of something bigger than themselves, and spending quality, unstructured time with their children.
When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.
There is a paradox here: people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.
The letter I wrote after my son was born said, “You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does-especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”
If respect and admiration are your goal, be careful how you seek it. Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.
Wealth is what you don’t see.
Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. But the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have $100,000 less than they did before they bought the car (or $100,000 more in debt). That’s all you know about them.
The hidden nature of wealth makes it hard to imitate others and learn from their ways.
It’s difficult to learn from what you can’t see. Which helps explain why it’s so hard for many to build wealth.
The world is filled with people who look modest but are actually wealthy and people who look rich who live at the razor’s edge of insolvency.
Past a certain level of income people fall into three groups: Those who save, those who don’t think they can save, and those who don’t think they need to save.
Building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate.
The value of wealth is relative to what you need.
Think of it like this, and one of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.
When you define savings as the gap between your ego and your income you realize why many people with decent incomes save so little. It’s a daily struggle against instincts to extend your peacock feathers to their outermost limits and keep up with others doing the same.
Saving does not require a goal of purchasing something specific. You can save just for saving’s sake. And indeed you should. Everyone should.
Savings without a spending goal gives you options and flexibility, the ability to wait and the opportunity to pounce. It gives you time to think. It lets you change course on your own terms.
In a world where intelligence is hyper-competitive and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills-like communication, empathy, and, perhaps most of all, flexibility.
My own theory is that, in the real world, people do not want the mathematically optimal strategy. They want the strategy that maximizes for how well they sleep at night.
The historical odds of making money in U.S. markets are 50/50 over one-day periods, 68% in one-year periods, 88% in 10-year periods, and (so far) 100% in 20-year periods. Anything that keeps you in the game has a quantifiable advantage.
If you view “do what you love” as a guide to a happier life, it sounds like empty fortune cookie advice. If you view it as the thing providing the endurance necessary to put the quantifiable odds of success in your favor, you realize it should be the most important part of any financial strategy.
History is mostly the study of surprising events. But it is often used by investors and economists as an unassailable guide to the future.
A trap many investors fall into is what I call “historians as prophets” fallacy: An overreliance on past data as a signal to future conditions in a field where innovation and change are the lifeblood of progress.
But investing is not a hard science. It’s a massive group of people making imperfect decisions with limited information about things that will have a massive impact on their wellbeing, which can make even smart people nervous, greedy and paranoid.
Another way to put this is that 0.00000000004% of people were responsible for perhaps the majority of the world’s direction over the last century.
The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries; that we should use past surprises as an admission that we have no idea what might happen next.
The average time between recessions has grown from about two years in the late 1800s to five years in the early 20th century to eight years over the last half-century.
Graham died in 1976. If the formulas he advocated were discarded and updated five times between 1934 and 1972, how relevant do you think they are in 2020? Or will be in 2050?
The further back in history you look, the more general your takeaways should be.
There is never a moment when you’re so right that you can bet every chip in front of you. The world isn’t that kind to anyone-not consistently, anyways. You have to give yourself room for error. You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.
Margin of safety-you can also call it room for error or redundancy-is the only effective way to safely navigate a world that is governed by odds, not certainties.
Room for error lets you endure a range of potential outcomes, and endurance lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a low-probability outcome fall in your favor.
Spreadsheets are good at telling you when the numbers do or don’t add up. They’re not good at modeling how you’ll feel when you tuck your kids in at night wondering if the investment decisions you’ve made were a mistake that will hurt their future. Having a gap between what you can technically endure versus what’s emotionally possible is an overlooked version of room for error.
The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out is ever worth taking.
“Russian roulette should statistically work” syndrome: An attachment to favorable odds when the downside is unacceptable in any circumstances.
Most critical systems on airplanes have backups, and the backups often have backups.
An underpinning of psychology is that people are poor forecasters of their future selves. Imagining a goal is easy and fun. Imagining a goal in the context of the realistic life stresses that grow with competitive pursuits is something entirely different.
What the future holds.” It’s another to admit that you, yourself, don’t know today what you will even want in the future.
Young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on.‚Å¥
“All of us,” he said, “are walking around with an illusion-an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” We tend to never learn this lesson. Gilbert’s research shows people from age 18 to 68 underestimate how much they will change in the future.
I know young people who purposefully live austere lives with little income, and they’re perfectly happy with it. Then there are those who work their tails off to pay for a life of luxury, and they’re perfectly happy with that. Both have risks-the former risks being unprepared to raise a family or fund retirement, the latter risks regret that you spent your youthful and healthy years in a cubicle.
We should avoid the extreme ends of financial planning. Assuming you’ll be happy with a very low income, or choosing to work endless hours in pursuit of a high one, increases the odds that you’ll one day find yourself at a point of regret.
Aiming, at every point in your working life, to have moderate annual savings, moderate free time, no more than a moderate commute, and at least moderate time with your family, increases the odds of being able to stick with a plan and avoid regret than if any one of those things fall to the extreme sides of the spectrum.
The odds of picking a job when you’re not old enough to drink that you will still enjoy when you’re old enough to qualify for Social Security are low.
We should also come to accept the reality of changing our minds.
Sunk costs-anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded-are a devil in a world where people change over time.
In this case it’s a never-ending taunt from the market, which gives big returns and takes them away just as fast.
Like the car, you have a few options: You can pay this price, accepting volatility and upheaval. Or you can find an asset with less uncertainty and a lower payoff, the equivalent of a used car. Or you can attempt the equivalent of grand-theft auto: Try to get the return while avoiding the volatility that comes along with it. Many people in investing choose the third option. Like a car thief-though well-meaning and law-abiding-they form tricks and strategies to get the return without paying the price. They trade in and out. They attempt to sell before the next recession and buy before the next boom.
The irony is that by trying to avoid the price, investors end up paying double.
Investors often innocently take cues from other investors who are playing a different game than they are.
The formation of bubbles isn’t so much about people irrationally participating in long-term investing. They’re about people somewhat rationally moving toward short-term trading to capture momentum that had been feeding on itself.
When a commentator on CNBC says, “You should buy this stock,” keep in mind that they do not know who you are. Are you a teenager trading for fun? An elderly widow on a limited budget? A hedge fund manager trying to shore up your books before the quarter ends? Are we supposed to think those three people have the same priorities, and that whatever level a particular stock is trading at is right for all three of them?
Few things matter more with money than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions and behaviors of people playing different games than you are.
Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way.
Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.
Everyone in 2009 carries smartphones that didn’t exist in 2007. Computers are now faster. Medicine is better. Cars get better gas mileage. Solar and fracking technology has advanced.
It seems crazy. But if you desperately need a solution and a good one isn’t known or readily available to you, the path of least resistance is toward Hajaji’s reasoning: willing to believe anything. Not just try anything, but believe it.
The plague killed a quarter of Londoners in 18 months. You’ll believe just about anything when the stakes are that high.
Consider that 85% of active mutual funds underperformed their benchmark over the 10 years ending 2018. That figure has been fairly stable for generations. You would think an industry with such poor performance would be a niche service and have a hard time staying in business. But there’s almost five trillion dollars invested in these funds.
Everyone has an incomplete view of the world. But we form a complete narrative to fill in the gaps.
Where there is selection there is art. Those who read history tend to look for what proves them right and confirms their personal opinions. They defend loyalties. They read with a purpose to affirm or to attack. They resist inconvenient truth since everyone wants to be on the side of the angels. Just as we start wars to end all wars.
Coming to terms with how much you don’t know means coming to terms with how much of what happens in the world is out of your control. And that can be hard to accept.
Carl Richards writes: “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.”
Psychologist Philip Tetlock once wrote: “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”
The outcome of a start-up depends as much on the achievements of its competitors and on changes in the market as on its own efforts.
Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness/compassion when they go wrong. Because it’s never as good or as bad as it looks. The world is big and complex. Luck and risk are both real and hard to identify. Do so when judging both yourself and others.
Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see.
Let’s look at a few short recommendations that can help you make better decisions with your money.
Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night.
If you want to do better as an investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon.
Become OK with a lot of things going wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune, because a small minority of things account for the majority of outcomes.
Use money to gain control over your time,
No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.
Save. Just save. You don’t need a specific reason to save.
Define the cost of success and be ready to pay it. Because nothing worthwhile is free. And remember that most financial costs don’t have visible price tags. Uncertainty, doubt, and regret are common costs in the finance world.
Define the cost of success and be ready to pay it. Because nothing worthwhile is free.
Uncertainty, doubt, and regret are common costs in the finance world.
you have to view them as fees (a price worth paying to get something nice in exchange) rather than fines (a penalty you should avoid).
Worship room for error. A gap between what could happen in the future and what you need to happen in the future in order to do well is what gives you endurance,
Avoid the extreme ends
You should like risk because it pays off over time. But you should be paranoid of ruinous risk
Define the game you’re playing, and make sure your actions are not being influenced by people playing a different game.
There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.
Half of all U.S. mutual fund portfolio managers do not invest a cent of their own money in their funds, according to Morningstar.⁶⁹
The difference between what someone suggests you do and what they do for themselves isn’t always a bad thing. It just underscores that when dealing with complicated and emotional issues that affect you and your family, there is no one right answer. There is no universal truth. There’s only what works for you and your family, checking the boxes you want checked in a way that leaves you comfortable and sleeping well at night.
Nassim Taleb explained: “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.”
We own our house without a mortgage, which is the worst financial decision we’ve ever made but the best money decision we’ve ever made. Mortgage interest rates were absurdly low when we bought our house. Any rational advisor would recommend taking advantage of cheap money and investing extra savings in higher-return assets, like stocks. But our goal isn’t to be coldly rational; just psychologically reasonable.
We also keep a higher percentage of our assets in cash than most financial advisors would recommend-something around 20% of our assets outside the value of our house.
We do it because cash is the oxygen of independence, and-more importantly-we never want to be forced to sell the stocks we own. We want the probability of facing a huge expense and needing to liquidate stocks to cover it to be as close to zero as possible.
Every investor should pick a strategy that has the highest odds of successfully meeting their goals. And I think for most investors, dollar-cost averaging into a low-cost index fund will provide the highest odds of long-term success.
We invest money from every paycheck into these index funds-a combination of U.S. and international stocks. There’s no set goal-it’s just whatever is leftover after we spend. We max out retirement accounts in the same funds, and contribute to our kids’ 529 college savings plans.
Effectively all of our net worth is a house, a checking account, and some Vanguard index funds.
Like it simple. One of my deeply held investing beliefs is that there is little correlation between investment effort and investment results. The reason is because the world is driven by tails-a few variables account for the majority of returns.
No matter how we save or invest I’m sure we’ll always have the goal of independence, and we’ll always do whatever maximizes for sleeping well at night.
The biggest difference between the economy of the 1945-1973 period and that of the 1982-2000 period was that the same amount of growth found its way into totally different pockets.
Between 1993 and 2012, the top 1 percent saw their incomes grow 86.1 percent, while the bottom 99 percent saw just 6.6 percent growth.
Household debt-to-income stayed about flat from 1963 to 1973. Then it climbed, and climbed, and climbed, from around 60% in 1973 to more than 130% by 2007.
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