That is because of factors including rapid growth in the Chinese economy, growing car ownership and rising ownership of household appliances.
The rising ownership of stocks by hedge funds reflected positions in some of America's biggest companies such as Bank of America, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and JP Morgan Chase.
Rising stock ownership, Klein writes, dampened hostility toward corporate enterprise.
As Andrew Oswald and I have shown in a recent paper* rising home ownership tends to reduce mobility and raises unemployment.
In recent years rising vehicle ownership has outpaced the growth of China's express highway system by a distance.
While rising car ownership fit nicely into the government's narrative of life as ever-improving after the 1979 Islamic revolution, clouds of smog from increased traffic congestion did not.
That's a reversal of the trend seen during most of the twentieth century, when falling wealth among the super-rich, along with phenomena like rising home ownership that benefitted the middle class, narrowed the gap.
Upmarket estate agent Savills said its research showed the era of rising home ownership is over and predicted that more than a million people will move into rented accommodation by 2018, with renters also facing higher prices.
What stands out, though, is rising bicycle ownership and interest in cycling: VeloHora, the largest cycling competition in eastern Europe, hosted 14,000 participants from Moldova and abroad this year on the streets of Chișinău.
Zhou Xi'an, a National Energy Administration official, said in a statement last month that fossil fuel consumption was likely to increase further in the second quarter of this year because of rising car ownership, diesel use in the increasingly mechanized agricultural sector and extra jet fuel consumption for travelers to the Shanghai Expo.
The aim of this study is to investigate the reasons behind rising car ownership and its impact on public transportation.
