US household net worth jumps $12.803T in Q2, largest nominal gain on record

A record nominal gain of this size is largely a story about the asset side of household balance sheets, not about broad-based improvement in household finances. It matters because it widens the gap between those who hold financial and real assets and those who do not, a distributional split that tends to feed into consumption patterns and political pressure. The open question is how much of the gain reflects durable asset appreciation versus a one-off repricing, and whether the revised first-quarter figure signals that these headline numbers are more volatile than they appear.