Slowly, Americans are recouping some of their loss of wealth from the recession, thanks to gains in stocks and home values.
It's likely to be a long trek.
Net worth - the value of assets such as homes and investments minus debts such as mortgages and credit cards - rose 5 percent last quarter to $53.4 trillion, the Federal Reserve said Thursday. That was the second straight quarterly increase.
Even with those gains, Americans' net worth remains far below the revised peak of $64.5 trillion reached before the recession began. That underscores the vast loss of wealth in the past two years. Net worth would need to rise an additional 21 percent just to return to its pre-recession height.
Many analysts don't expect a quick repeat of the strong second- and third-quarter gains. That's why Scott Hoyt, senior director of consumer economics at Moody's Economy.com, thinks household wealth won't match its pre-recession peak until about 2012.
"We're clearly moving in the right direction," Hoyt said.
Stocks delivered the biggest boost to net worth in the July-September period. The value of stocks jumped $1.04 trillion, or about 17 percent, slightly less than the previous quarter's rise.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 15 percent in the third quarter and has surged about 60 percent since March. Still, the S&P index is 32 percent off the peak of October 2007. The recession began in December 2007.
Net worth hit bottom at $48.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2009.
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