FORWARD! How Middle Class Wealth Collapsed to a 40-Year Low. “Between 2007 and 2010, the median net worth of U.S. households fell by 47 percent, reaching its lowest level in more than forty years, adjusted for inflation. In other words, middle class wealth virtually evaporated in this country. A good chunk of the population got sucked through a financial wormhole back to the sixties. . . . Our economy still fundamentally runs on middle class spending — on houses, on cars, on trips to the mall — and those families saw their finances eviscerated in a way unlike what’s happened during any recession since World War II.”