American households added $12.8 trillion in wealth in the second quarter of 2026, the largest quarterly gain on record, Axios reports. Almost $11 trillion of it came from stocks and other financial assets.
Stocks now make up 34% of household wealth, nearly twice the 18% held in real estate. And according to the analysis Axios cites, about half of all consumption growth is now being driven by that wealth effect: people spending because their portfolios went up.
That's good news for the economy right now. It's also a dependency most businesses never signed up for.
The Boom Has an Address
The gains are real, but they didn't land evenly. As of Q2, the top 1% held 51% of all stocks and mutual fund shares, while the bottom half of households held less than 1%, per Axios. Allianz's 2026 Global Wealth Report puts the top 10%'s share of corporate equities at 87.3%.
Spending follows the same curve. Moody's Analytics found that households in the top 10% of earners — roughly $251,000 a year and up — accounted for 49.2% of all U.S. consumer spending in mid-2025, up from about 43% in 2020. Spending by middle-income households, meanwhile, had barely moved in two years.
"This group is driving the economic train with their spending," Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist, said at the time. "If they pull back, they'll take the economy with them."
Put the two findings together, and the picture sharpens: a growing share of U.S. demand comes from a shrinking slice of households whose confidence is tied directly to the market.
Two Customers, One Economy
For everyone else, the headlines and the household budget have come apart. The share of people making net withdrawals from their investment accounts has doubled since 2019 — people drawing down savings, not building them.
That squares with what our own coverage has tracked this month: diesel above $6, the Fed's first rate hike since 2023, a 10-year Treasury yield back above 5%. Those costs hit every household. The offsetting portfolio gains hit only some of them.
So when a report says "the consumer is resilient," it's worth asking which consumer. The aggregate number is real. It just may not describe the people walking into your store.
Why the Dependency Cuts Both Ways
Economists estimate that each dollar of stock-market wealth produces about one cent of additional spending, according to the Axios analysis. A penny sounds small until you multiply it by $11 trillion in a single quarter. It works just as powerfully in reverse.
Allianz Research has modeled that reverse. A 25% correction in the S&P 500 would erase about $27 trillion in U.S. household wealth — nearly 14% of total net worth — and would likely tip the economy into recession, the report finds. U.S. households hold two-thirds of their financial savings in equities, about 28 points more than European households, which makes the exposure unusually direct.
Krishna Guha, head of economics at Evercore ISI, told Axios that the AI boom has "delivered extraordinary increases in the value of the stock market" — and warned that a downturn would leave the economy "more vulnerable than normal."
None of this is a market call. It's a description of where your demand comes from. "AI could become the next great wealth engine, but the key question is who gets a stake in it," says Katharina Utermoehl of Allianz Research. For a business owner, the question is narrower: do your customers have a stake?
What This Means
- Find out which economy you sell into. Look at your customer mix by income, ticket size, and how discretionary your product is. Premium services, luxury goods, travel, high-end dining, and home improvement sit closest to the wealth effect. Essentials and value brands sit furthest away. Most businesses are a blend — know your blend.
- If you sell to the top, stress-test for a drawdown. Ask what happens to bookings, average order value, and receivables if your best customers feel 20% poorer in a quarter. Build the cash cushion while revenue is strong; our Ep. 18, "Your Profit Is a Rumor. Your Cash Is a Fact," makes the case. Watch leading signals — cancellations, smaller orders, slower payments — not the S&P itself.
- If you sell to the middle, don't borrow the headline's confidence. Aggregate spending data is increasingly a story about other people. Price for value, keep entry points accessible, and expect your customers to stay careful even when markets are cheering.
- If you can, serve both. A tiered offer — a premium line and an accessible one — is the most practical hedge a small business has against a two-speed economy.
The AI boom has made many Americans richer, and those Americans are spending. The question for any business isn't whether the boom is real. It's how much of your revenue is quietly riding on it.
Discussion