The inequality begins in pre-K, where rich kids go to school and poor kids don't. That's partly because, in most states, child care costs more than in-state college tuition. The result? The gap between rich and poor kids' math and reading skills has been growing for decades.

• Once school begins, white students receive $2,226 more funding per year than students of color, thanks to locally funded educational systems. Disadvantaged students end up 3–4 years behind their more affluent peers. Of course, the richest families bypass the public education system entirely and spend tens of thousands of dollars per year to educate their children privately. They also dominate selective public schools.
• Getting into college is easier for richer children, who have the advantage of $200-an-hour tutoring. Rich kids are also orders of magnitude more likely to get recruited to elite institutions. Add in legacy admissions and other ways of buying your way into selective colleges, and the result is that students from the 1% are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League school than students coming from families earning less than $30,000 a year.
• College is largely unaffordable for the poor, who are also excluded from the pervasive institution of unpaid internships. The rich, meanwhile, benefit from massive tax expenditures subsidizing their tuition costs.

Why it matters: Inequality of educational opportunity doesn't just deprive the economy of trillions of dollars' worth of untapped human capital. Its ubiquity and visibility also makes it a key breeding ground for resentment and corruption anxiety within the 99%.

The booming economy isn't touching all corners of the country, and farmers in particular are facing a very different economic reality than the strong economic growth and low unemployment rate elsewhere.

• The deterioration of rural fortunes can be seen most acutely in Wisconsin, where dairy farms closed at a rate of two per day last year. The state's dairy industry accounts for half of the state’s "critical agricultural sector ... generates $43.4 billion a year in economic activity ... and supports 413,500 jobs or 11.9% of the state’s employment," according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

"For a lot of farmers, this has been a gut check. Are we going to tough this thing out, or are we going to get out?"

Downturns in farming are normal and almost expected. The worst in recent history was the farm credit crisis in the 1980s, with low commodity prices and sky-high interest rates. At the height of that crisis, in 1987, there were almost 6,000 farmers who filed for bankruptcy. There were 498 in 2018, while farm profitability was $63 billion — the second lowest in the past ten years.

What is different this time is farmers have seen declining commodity prices for years. And the trade war, which caused less demand for commodities from foreign buyers, has made it more painful (despite $7.7 billion so far in aid from the Trump administration). Extreme weather conditions, like the record flooding seen in the Midwest, have added another layer of uncertainty.

The bottom line, from Steven Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: "Farmers are structured to ride these waves out, but when the waves are this long they can't ride that out."

The financials were Fed day's biggest losers, as bank stocks saw big losses on big trading volumes.

What's happening: Bank of America was the 2nd most actively traded stock in the S&P 500, with 81 million shares changing hands, per FactSet — well above the 3-month average volume of 67 million shares. The stock fell 3.4%.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs was the biggest decliner in the Dow on Wednesday. Shares fell 3.38% after the Fed said it would hold rates steady and signaled the end of rate hikes for the rest of the year.

• More than 5.2 million Goldman shares were traded, the highest trading volume since Jan. 31. That was the day after the Fed first introduced the word "patient" in its FOMC statement.

JPMorgan and Citi also saw slightly higher trading activity than in previous days this week, with 14 million and 17 million shares exchanged, respectively.

• Only 2 stocks in the S&P 500's financial sector closed in the green: Ameriprise Financial and MSCI.

The big picture: A low-interest rate environment is seen as negative for bank stocks.

• "Lower interest rates ... [do] hurt banks in terms of their net interest margins and their profitability on new loans ... [and] that's probably the concern more on a bank’s earnings fundamentals in terms of potential slowing in earnings growth," Paul Eitelman, a strategist at asset management firm Russell Investments, told Bloomberg.

Go deeper: Dissecting Goldman Sachs' $100 million pullout from social impact ETF