Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, December 13th. I'm Nyla Boodon.

Here's what we're covering today. Fires prompt a movement to ban e-bikes. Plus, Utah

becomes the latest day to partially ban TikTok. But first, how wealthy do Americans feel?

That's today's one big thing.

The net wealth of American households and nonprofits declined for the third consecutive quarter

this year and a 9% dip compared to last year. Axios' markets correspondent, Matt Phillips,

is here to explain exactly how interest rates and the housing and stock markets

are slowly melting away pandemic wealth gains. Hey, Matt.

Hey, Nala, how you doing? Matt, can you explain what household net worth

actually is and how it's measured? Sure. It's basically the short version is,

it's your assets minus your liability. So your assets being your 401k, any real estate you have

versus their debts. So the Federal Reserve comes up with these numbers for the entire US household

and nonprofit sector. So economists like to talk about something called the wealth of fact,

which basically means the more money people have, the better they feel about spending, right?

Yeah, this is one of the more closely studied relationships and economics. It really gained a lot

of traction during the 1990s when there was just a boom in consumer spending that also coincided

with the boom in the stock market values and this wealth effect notion was that people really began

to feel much better about their financial position and therefore that gave them a confidence to

go out and buy that big screen TV or splurge on new car and things like that.

And so how different are things this holiday season then? During the pandemic, that was actually

a start of a really good time for wealth because when the Fed moved to counteract the economic

downturn, they cut interest rates to zero. You know, that brought mortgage rates down really quickly

...