Baby boomers hold more than $85 trillion in assets, making them the richest generation by far. New research explores the extraordinary rise in their good fortunes – one that experts say successive generations will be hard-pressed to replicate.

The reasons come down to timing and time: Americans 75 and older bought homes and invested in stocks well before such assets exploded in value, according to Edward Wolff, an economics professor at New York University. In a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, he examined the four decades between 1983 and 2022 when those older boomers’ saw their wealth climb and their younger peers recorded relative declines.

“It’s astonishing how their relative wealth has taken off in the last 30 plus years,” Wolff said. “They started out as

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