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Background: Economic inequality in the United States is extreme, but little is known about the national origin of affluent households. Households in the top one percent by total wealth own vastly disproportionate quantities of household assets and have correspondingly high levels of economic, social, and political influence. The overrepresentation of white natives (i.e., those born in the U.S.) among high-wealth households is well-documented, but changing migration dynamics suggest that a growing portion of top households may be immigrants. Methods: Because no single survey dataset contains top wealth holders and data about country of origin, this paper uses two publicly-available data sets: the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Multiple imputation is used to impute country of birth from the SIPP into the SCF. Descriptive statistics are used to demonstrate reliability of the method, to estimate the prevalence of immigrants among top wealth holders, and to document patterns of asset ownership among affluent immigrants. Results: Significant numbers of top wealth holders who are usually classified as white natives may be immigrants. Many top wealth holders appear to be European and Canadian immigrants, and increasing numbers of top wealth holders are likely from Asia and Latin America as well. Results suggest that of those in the top one percent of wealth holders, approximately 3% are European and Canadian immigrants, .5% are from Mexico or Cuban, and 1.7% are from Asia (especially Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and India). Ownership of key assets varies considerably across affluent immigrant groups. Conclusion: Although the percentage of top wealth holders who are immigrants is relatively small, these percentages represent large numbers of households with considerable resources and corresponding social and political influence. Evidence that the propensity to allocate wealth to real and financial assets varies across immigrant groups suggests that wealth ownership is more global than previous research suggests and that immigrant groups are likely to become more prevalent in top wealth positions in the U.S. As the representation of immigrants in top wealth positions grows, their economic, social, and political influence is likely to increase as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic geographers have deployed a variety of spatial categories (e.g., scale, territory and border) to describe and theorize the spatiality of market making and marketization processes. This article supplements these accounts with insights from the work of post-structural geographers oriented toward the site. To this end, the article introduces the notion of the marketsite. Marketsites are points where heterogeneous elements are brought together and assembled in an effort to realize the conditions required for the performance of model markets and market subjectivities. Using the example of smart disclosure, the article argues that the use of disclosure labels to improve consumer decision making has transformed the point of sale and other transactional junctures into incipient marketsites—niches where various behavioral techniques are deployed to summon into being subjects who behave as if they were Homines economici. The behavioral turn in economics has focused the market-making efforts of a variety of actors on the market subject and strategic sites in people’s everyday lives where they can be guided and nudged into alignment with market models. Together such marketsites delineate a new, and largely uncharted, geography of encounter between (behavioral) economic theory and actually existing markets. Drawing on fieldwork developing and testing a fee disclosure box for a prepaid debit card, I show that the production of marketsites, where Homo economicus can survive, is a messy process that rarely succeeds. Regardless, such efforts reveal valuable insights into how the behavioral turn in economics is reshaping the spatiality of market-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the developments made in the field of lending and financial technology industry in the U.S. Topics discussed include national bank charter proposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for regulating the financial technology industry; enactment of Federal Trade Commission Act and the and Consumer Financial Protection Act for protecting consumers; and legitimacy of the charter.

The owned home is central to both the American Dream and the financial lives of U.S. households. This article explores the typical financial trajectories of homeowners during the Great Recession, assessing the viability of positioning home equity at the core of a household's balance sheet. Using the 2007–2009 reinterview panel of the Survey of Consumer Finances, we describe the diverse balance sheets of groups of homeowning households. While some homeowners lost equity and wealth in the Great Recession, we find that an owned home introduced severe risk of loss, but homeowners were less likely than renters to lose very large proportions of their wealth. The experience of homeowners' balance sheets during the downturn was diverse, and the typical experiences of different groups are compared and contrasted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]