By Duvi Honig
Founder & CEO, Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce; Co-Founder and Secretary, Multicultural Business Coalition

America’s economic dashboard is flashing green.

The S&P 500 trades near 7,400, a record. The Nasdaq has pushed past 26,000, also a record. The Dow sits near all-time highs. On paper, the message could not be clearer: the economy is booming.

Now ask the average American how the economy feels. You will hear a completely different story.

Families are rationing groceries. Total household debt has climbed to a record $18.8 trillion, with credit-card balances alone near $1.25 trillion and a rising share of borrowers falling behind. Homeownership is slipping out of reach for millions. More Americans are working second jobs just to hold their ground.

Both of these realities cannot be equally true. And yet we are told they are.

The uncomfortable fact is that America’s most-watched economic indicators have stopped telling the full story.

For generations, the stock market served as a rough proxy for the nation’s economic health. Manufacturing, transportation, retail, energy, banking, healthcare, and consumer spending all fed into it. When the market rose, it usually meant the broad economy was rising too.

That link is now breaking.

A handful of companies tied to artificial intelligence are increasingly responsible for driving the major indexes. The “Magnificent Seven”, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla, now make up roughly 35% to 40% of the entire S&P 500 by market value. Forty cents of every dollar flowing into a passive S&P 500 index fund now pours into just seven companies.

Think about what that means. The benchmark most Americans treat as a measure of the whole economy has quietly become a concentrated bet on a single industry. When those seven names rise, the index rises, and the country is told it is prospering, even if the other 493 companies and the families who depend on them are struggling.

There is nothing wrong with innovation. AI may prove to be one of the most important breakthroughs in modern history. But when one industry grows powerful enough to pull the entire market higher while much of the country feels left behind, the market stops working as an honest barometer.

The market is supposed to reflect the economy. Instead, the economy is being overshadowed by the market.

It gets harder still. Some of Wall Street’s strongest performers are thriving precisely because of conditions that hurt ordinary Americans.

Oil companies post record profits when energy prices spike. Banks post record profits when interest rates stay high. Shareholders cheer those earnings. But many of those profits are built on the very pressures crushing families trying to cover a mortgage, a car payment, the grocery bill, and the credit-card minimum.

In plain terms: some of the most celebrated corporate earnings in America today are being fueled by the financial pain of the middle class.

That should stop policymakers cold.

Consider one striking, and openly debated, statistic. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi estimates that the top 10% of American households, those earning roughly $250,000 or more, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, around 49%, the highest share since the data began in 1989. Three decades ago it was about 36%. Zandi estimates this single sliver of households drives close to a third of the entire economy.

Some economists dispute Zandi’s exact figures, and that debate is healthy. But even the more conservative estimates from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the New York Fed confirm the underlying truth: spending by the wealthy has pulled far ahead of everyone else since 2020, while the bottom 80% have merely kept pace with inflation. As Zandi himself put it, it is no mystery why most Americans feel the economy isn’t working for them.

When economic growth leans this heavily on the spending of the richest Americans, it manufactures the appearance of broad prosperity while millions quietly fall behind. And it builds that prosperity on a dangerously narrow foundation. Consumer spending drives about 70% of the economy. If the fortunes of the wealthy turn, say, a sharp market drop that dents their confidence, the spending that props up the whole system could pull back overnight.

Meanwhile, a growing number of Americans are taking on second jobs, side gigs, and extra shifts, not for ambition, but for survival. Housing, groceries, insurance, healthcare, transportation, and interest payments have all outrun household incomes. For millions, one paycheck is no longer enough.

That is a warning sign, not a footnote.

An economy where record market gains sit alongside record consumer debt, rising financial anxiety, and a growing need for multiple jobs is not a balanced economy. It is an economy sending two contradictory signals at once.

Now look at the moment we are living through. The Middle East remains unstable. The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most vital energy corridors, faces ongoing risk. Oil prices are volatile. Consumer debt is at historic highs. Affordability is strained across much of the country.

And still, the stock market sets records.

If that does not raise hard questions about how we measure economic health, what will?

Here is the heart of it: America does not have a market problem. It has a measurement problem.

We need a new economic scorecard, one that tracks not just stock prices and corporate profits, but the things families actually live:

• Wage growth versus inflation
• Consumer debt burdens
• Housing affordability
• Small-business health
• Household savings
• Middle-class purchasing power
• Workforce participation
• Economic mobility
• Sector balance across the broader economy

And we must ask, seriously, whether any single industry should be allowed to dominate the indexes Americans treat as a proxy for national health. Perhaps AI deserves its own dedicated benchmark. Perhaps the broad indexes should be reweighted to reflect real economic diversity. Perhaps we need entirely new measures built for a new economy.

The specific solution is open for debate. What is no longer debatable is that the current system is losing credibility.

I write this because someone needs to say plainly what millions of Americans already know in their gut: the economy being celebrated on Wall Street is not the economy being lived on Main Street.

The market is strong. AI is creating staggering value. Corporate profits are climbing. But beneath those headlines, millions of Americans are working longer hours, carrying record debt, and watching the American Dream drift further away.

If one industry can drive the indexes higher while much of the country struggles, if oil profits rise while families pay more at the pump, if banks book record earnings while Americans pay record interest, and if growth increasingly depends on a thin slice of high earners, then our dashboard is no longer measuring the health of the nation.

It is measuring the success of a select few while ignoring the reality facing everyone else.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, members of Congress, state legislators, economists, regulators, and business leaders should come together to modernize how America measures its economy, building a scorecard that captures affordability, debt, wages, household stability, and middle-class prosperity alongside stock prices and earnings.

This is not about politics. It is about credibility.

Because if Americans keep being told the economy is thriving while their own lives say otherwise, trust in our institutions, our markets, and our data will keep eroding. And once people stop believing the scoreboard, they stop believing in the system itself.

America deserves an economic dashboard that reflects reality, not just market performance.

America needs a new economic scorecard for a new economy.

The time for lawmakers, regulators, and business leaders to act is now.

New York — JBizNews Desk

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