Top 10% account for nearly half of all consumer spending: Report

(NewsNation) — The U.S. economy is running more and more on luxury fuel — the spending power of the wealthy.

Consumers in the top 10% of income distribution were behind 49.2% of total spending in the second quarter, the highest level in data going back to 1989, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.

That share ticked up from 48.5% in the first quarter and is well above the roughly 35% level of the early 1990s, according to Moody's Analytics' review of Federal Reserve data, published by Bloomberg.

"Looking at the data, it’s not a mystery why most Americans feel like the economy isn’t working for them," Zandi wrote Tuesday on X.

For those in the bottom 80% of the income distribution — making less than about $175,000 a year — spending has simply k