That's because houses accounts for nearly 63% of the assets of the middle-class, Edward Wolff, an economics professor at New York University, said in a paper released on Monday.
The major assets of the middle-class asset are their homes, whose values continue to drop.
With mutual funds, municipal bonds and a blue-chip stock or two, Mr. Lazio had salted away his money in the kind of assets that countless other middle-class suburbanites have embraced.
IN 2005, K. Geert Rouwenhorst and Gary B. Gorton, now finance professors at Yale, published a paper about the investment benefits of an asset class that was then the province of specialists: commodities.
However its assets were of class considered to be of sound quality.
Later on in that same paragraph the reader is confronted with this: "The end product is a more robust and time-consistent combination of asset classes that map clearly to the underlying factors".
The problem for many people is that concentrating investments in just one or two asset classes, like stocks and bonds, is inherently riskier than spreading investments across a broad-based group of asset classes that would include commodities, real estate, notes and private placements.
First, there are entire classes of assets that are forbidden.
That said, the Blackstone cofounder lauded the promise of real estate, an asset class that comprises an enormous part of his firm's business.
We already have an annual wealth tax on homes, the major asset of the middle class.
We developed a strategy that identified a variety of different asset classes that we believe are an integral part of an investor's overall wealth plan over a long period of time and put them together in one fund at certain target percentages.
