NY Post:  US Has Half-Million Fewer 401(k) Millionaires After Virus

The coronavirus crisis also has yet another type of toll: the health crisis reportedly has eliminated at least a half million of the nation’s “401(k) millionaires.”

There were over 11 million households in America worth between $1 million and $5 million in February, according to Spectrem Group’s Market Insights Report 2020.

“That figure — the number of 401(k) millionaires, as they were called — was heralded in many newspapers just a few weeks ago,” the New York Post’s John Crudele reported.

Now, according to Spectrem, there are half a million fewer in this group because of the recent stock market meltdown, the Post reported.

And things could stand to get worse.

As the economic shock from the coronavirus pandemic upends Wall Street, U.S. investors are expressing the most pessimism about the direction of the stock market since February and March 2009, in the aftermath of the previous financial crisis, according to an American Association of Individual Investors survey conducted during the week that ended Wednesday.

Some 52.1% of investors surveyed were bearish about the U.S. stock market, up 0.9 percentage point from last week and well above the historical average of 30.5%, Reuters reported.

Bullishness, meanwhile, dipped 1.4 percentage points to 32.9%, compared with a historical average of 38%.

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