I do think this country has always been a symbol of an opportunity to do whatever you can with your life. And a lot of people have made money, and that has always been a part of the American tradition. And a lot of people made a lot of money for many years in the middle class. The biggest storehouse of their wealth was their homes. And those homes have gone down and continue to go down, well past the numbers you saw here. So it's well over 40 percent. It was the largest asset on the balance sheet of the average American family. But if you combine that with the fact that we have close to 30 million people who are either unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for a job, you realize what dire circumstances have affected, in economic terms, so many of the middle-class people of America. -Mortimer Zuckerman

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Nearly forty percent of wealth is how much the average American household hemorrhaged over three years, 2007 to 2010. The latest Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances details how middle-class families' net wealth is tied to the value of their homes. Middle-class wealth took a big hit during the first three years of the recession with its collapse of the housing market. In dollar terms, says the Fed, the overall wealth of the median household five years ago, 2007, was $126,000. Overall wealth consists of income, financial assets and home worth. Three years later, 2010, the $126,000 overall wealth had dropped to $77,000, almost a 40 percent drop in three years. Seven trillion dollars in home equity was lost between 2007 and 2010, says the Fed. The housing bust, with its accompanying mortgage defaults, mostly did the deed. Fast forward to March 2011 to March 2012, a one-year spread. Housing prices dropped more, 1.9 percent. Rob Shapiro, Bill Clinton's undersecretary of Commerce, on PBS Newshour tells why the bottom keeps falling, 'We spent $1.2 trillion directly stabilizing the financial markets, and another $2 trillion indirectly through the Fed stabilizing those markets. It worked. We spent virtually nothing to stabilize the housing market. Those values continue to go down. And so we have increased inequality significantly through this event.'