I realize first, though, that I left out an important issue in the last post: what I call the accounting-ownership pyramid. The household sector sits at the top; households ultimately “own” everything (that’s ownable and measurable), in accounting terms. The market-cap value of all firms, for instance, is an asset on the household-sector balance sheet. We can think of the firms sector as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the household sector. At least in this accounting sense, the measured wealth of the nation is the wealth of households. (See the first figure in the previous post.)