It's not a coincidence that separation point in the chart begins shortly after the Fed began heavily harming the US dollar and promoting a bubble dependent economy based on asset inflation schemes (the first point of separation represents the real estate bubble and the beginning of the 2005-2007 soft bubble of the stock market). You can also witness the exact same spike in the GDP of every other country on earth when priced in US Dollars, nicely showing off how dramatically the Fed was harming the currency (give it a try, type in: "romania gdp" or "peru gdp" or any country, into google and look at how they all perfectly skyrocket at exactly the same time, in tandem with the USD falling and coinciding with the lift-off in this article's chart).<p>The huge jump in household assets is the representation of the Fed inflating, which simultaneously debases the median (and below), while increasing in <i>nominal</i> terms the wealth of the top ~10% (who can hedge and dodge inflation for the most part, while worker incomes and basic savings cannot).<p>Bill Gates is worth $84 billion, right? The rich have gotten a lot richer, right? No they haven't, they've merely kept up with the Fed debasing the dollar. Everyone else has gotten poorer. If you inflation adjust the rich backwards, they're only slightly richer than they were 20 years ago. Gates is lucky if he's worth $40 billion in 1997 terms. Whether we're talking about housing, oil, gold, silver, platinum, copper, milk, eggs, education costs, health care costs, car costs or nearly anything else - you can roughly increase those costs by 70%-100% (at least, more in the case of edu and health care) over 20 years due to Fed inflation.