The booming U.S. economy of the 1990s has created the impression that all American

households are doing well, particularly in terms of wealth acquisition. Our results show that this is

decidedly not the case. In this paper, we develop several measures of “asset poverty” and use them to

document changes from 1983 to 1998 in the extent to which American households are unable to rely on

an asset cushion to sustain themselves during temporary hard times. These measures indicate that in the

face of the massive growth in overall assets in the United States, the level of asset poverty has actually

been rising. In addition to showing the trends in overall asset poverty in the United States, we describe the patterns of asset poverty rates for various socioeconomic (e.g., race, age, schooling, family structure)

groups over the 1983–1998 period. We find that the prosperity of the 1990s brought an unexpected

increase in asset poverty for groups that are generally viewed as not particularly vulnerable (such as

whites and college-educated families), and a sizable reduction in asset poverty for vulnerable groups such as racial minorities and single-parent families.