But the quintessential gold bug is an investor who expects every form of paper wealth to collapse, along with civilisation itself.Gold is not like other commodities.
Thus, with falling housing wealth and collapsing MEW, U.S. households cannot use their homes anymore as ATM machines.
Many of Ukraine's oligarchs, an elite club of around a dozen billionaires, amassed their wealth following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
With activity in the services sector at its lowest since October 2001, the economy looks perilously vulnerable to falling housing wealth and the collapse in mortgage finance, residential investment and property transactions.The mortgage market has already plumbed unprecedented depths.
The wealth quintiles were collapsed in the analysis to tertiles (1st and 2nd quintiles: low; 3rd quintile: medium; and 4th and 5th quintiles: high).
For the present analysis, the wealth index was collapsed into three groups (poor, middle and rich) to give meaningful and practical sub-population categories for designing programme interventions in the general community.
To identify heterogeneous effects by poverty, the wealth quintiles were collapsed into a dichotomous variable with the two poorest quintiles groups together as poor and the two upper quintiles grouped as non-poor.
In the UK, there was a similar, if smaller, collapse in wealth after 2007.
In the United States, the epicenter of the credit crisis, $8.3 trillion in household wealth evaporated in the collapse of housing prices.
The $8 trillion in wealth lost in the collapse of the housing bubble was mostly held by older workers and retirees.
