Portfolio structure of US households

The U.S. financial market is relatively liberal and although there is a large variety of investment types, on average, the US households hold a simple and safe form of portfolio structure (Bertaut and Starr, 2000). Taking a look at the year 2007 (see Table 5), a typical household had only three types of assets: a checking account, a savings account and a retirement account (which has grown a lot since 1989). Another point is that even less than half of all households have any type of investment in stocks. In 2008 a critical event occurred to the global financial market. Many people in the United States lost their homes, a lot of their investments or got bankrupt due to the negative effects of the crisis. Household portfolios were influenced by these incidents. Some asset types lost significantly in value. Therefore households have had to rearrange their portfolios and are behind in their payments.