wealth – The Burning Platform

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Money is not humanity’s best subject. And although our body of scientific knowledge grows with each passing year, when it comes to financial matters, we somehow keep stepping on the same rake — that inescapable pattern of financial boom and bust.”

James Grant

“There’s a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can’t afford cancer treatment even with ‘good’ insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry…

‘I can’t believe this in the richest country in the world. …’

The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its common lived environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation like GDP, or even an attempt at weighted comparisons like so-called purchasing power parity. There is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look so shabby. The money goes elsewhere…

Poverty—both individual and social—is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources. They are eminently undoable by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women.”

Jacob Bacharach, The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves

Greenspan Admits The Fed’s Plan Was Always To Push Stocks Higher

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/18/2016 12:40 -0400

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in an interview with Sara Eisen that quantitative easing did what it was supposed to do, which was to inflate stock prices and drive multiple expansion.

He was confused as to why things such as corporate earnings, capital spending, and productivity have declined given how much QE was pumped into the system. The answer to the riddle of course, is that QE was never intended to help fix anything fundamentally, it was as Kyle Bass said recently, simply a mechanism to transfer wealth and make the rich richer.

“Monetary policy has done everything it can, unless you want to put additional QEs on and QEs on, they’re not helping that much.

What ultimately determines whether or not you’re getting an effect from the QEs are what has happened to the price/earnings ratio, and that obviously has done what you’d expect it to do.

You bring long-term rates down, and the price/earnings ratios in the equity markets go up, which is exactly what they planned to do and it’s happened that way.“

All of this is precisely what we’ve been saying all along, which is that QE has always been about one thing, and that is to take wealth from many (savers), and transfer it to a select few (asset owners).

Saving the Banks and Fabulously Enriching a Few On the Back of the Real Economy

Guest Post by Jesse

“Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they’re causing, and they will not stop until they’ve run the world economy off a cliff.”

Philipp Meyer

“Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.”

Michael Lewis

“My daughter asked me when she came home from school, “What’s the financial crisis?” and I said, it’s something that happens every five to seven years.”

Jamie Dimon

“The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming, and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen again.”

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2009–2011)

The US has been in a cycle of bubbles, busts, and crashes since at least 1995, and more likely since Alan Greenspan became the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in August, 1987.

The cycle is the same, only the depth and duration seems to change in a continuing ‘wash and rinse’ of the public money and the real economy.

It has become a machine for transferring income, wealth, ownership, and power to the very top.

This is not ‘the new normal.’ This is financial corruption and the erosion of systemic integrity.

Are there any markets that have not been shown to have been systematically manipulated, for years?

This is just institutionalized looting.

HOW RICH ARE YOU?

The four guys listed below all started businesses or invested in businesses that succeeded. Entrepreneurs starting businesses is what creates jobs in this country. The problem seems to be that once these men reach a certain level of wealth, they can buy influence in our government. When they use this influence to further enrich themselves, you end up with a warped corporate fascist society that eventually leads to revolution. At this point, there seems to be no solution.

The elite are meeting in Davos to ponder how they can reverse the global stock market crash currently under way. Their hundreds of billions in wealth is on track to become tens of billions in wealth. The central bankers will be instructed to print money at a more rapid pace. None of their solutions will benefit the poor or middle class. You are nothing but expendable peasants to the elite. A good war will cull the herd.

When you consider how poor most of the 7 billion people on this planet are, putting your data into this website should make you feel pretty good.

See how you compare to the GLOBAL RICH.

As The “Prosperity” Tide Recedes, The Ugly Reality Of Wealth Inequality Is Exposed

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

This chart of median household income illustrates why so many of us feel poorer– we are poorer in terms of the purchasing power of our income.

A rising tide raises all boats, from rowboats to yachts–this is the narrative of “prosperity.”

A rising tide is also the political cover for rising inequality: if the guy in the rowboat makes $100 more a month, he feels like he’s participating in the prosperity.

Meanwhile, the guy in the speedboat is making $1,000 more a month and the guy in the yacht is making $1 million more a month.

But this doesn’t bother the guy in the rowboat, for two reasons:

1. He thinks of himself as a guy who is currently in a rowboat on his way to buying a speedboat

2. Studies have found that our sense of wealth and “falling behind” is not defined by our actual increases in income or wealth, but by how we’re doing relative to our peer group. If everyone else in rowboats is making $200 more a month in the rising tide of prosperity, the guy making only $100 more feels like he’s falling behind–even if his absolute income and wealth is rising.

Conversely, if his peers are all suffering declines in income while his income is holding steady, he feels like he’s doing pretty well for himself, even though his income is stagnant.

The fact that the wealthy are gaining far more in “prosperity” in both absolute and relative terms doesn’t bother him as long as he’s doing as well or better as his peers and feels he has a chance to eventually move up from a rowboat to a speedboat.

Continue reading “As The “Prosperity” Tide Recedes, The Ugly Reality Of Wealth Inequality Is Exposed”

Inequality of Wealth

Guest post by Martin Armstrong

1904 View of Standard Oil

During the Progressive Era around 1910, the Marxist view of the world was all about the massive wealth of the very rich like Rockefeller. Standard Oil would always rule the world. How could that possibly change? They argued this was undermining economic opportunity for others. The government championed the progressive income tax and attacked inheritance taxes to solve what everyone assumed was not fair – the inequality of wealth. We are talking about total net worth, not income.

WHERE DO YOU RANK IN WEALTH

(If you have a household net worth of X … you rank in the Y percentile):

$50,000 … 60th percentile
$93,000 … 50th percentile
$100,000 … 48th percentile
$200,000 … 34th percentile
$500,000 … 18th percentile
$750,000 … 12th percentile
$827,000 … 10th percentile
$1 million … 8th percentile
$1.4 million … 5th percentile
$6 million … 1st percentile

Inequality in wealth is approaching record levels again as everyone now harps on not the 1%, by the top 10%. The top 10% of families own 75.3% of the nation’s wealth. So if you have $827,000 in total net worth (real estate, stocks, savings, everything), that’s you. The bottom half of families own 1.1% of it. The families squished in between those two groups own 24.6% of the national wealth.

The fascinating solution is always to tax the rich bastards more to drag them down to even the scale. This is like seeing someone with a nice watch and you go take it because it is not fair they have something you do not. Hillary, who is clearly in the top 1%, claims she stands for toppling the top 1%. I suppose her goal is to make everyone equally poor except her and her backers. When she was championing healthcare, her response to a question that it would put small mom and pop stores out of business was crude. IF they could not afford it, then they should not be in business.

Nobody ever looks at what is keeping the bottom 90% of families from reaching the top 10%. Two primary factors come into play. Government cares nothing about what they preach and neither do the hosts on MSNBC who champion hating the rich, yet they themselves all earn enough to be in that top 10%. On top of that, four of MSNBC hosts had serious tax liens against them and owe the government millions. Al Sharpton allegedly has owes $4.5 million so he is in the top 1%.

Continue reading “Inequality of Wealth”

IT’S GOOD TO BE RICH

After reviewing the following charts I’ve concluded it is better to be rich than poor. There is no question the gap between the richest and poorest is widening. The facts show the rich getting richer, the poor staying poor, and the middle class becoming poorer. You’ll be happy to know pleasure aircraft was the fastest-growing category of all consumer spending in 2013. I guess those food stamp users are living it up.

The facts don’t lie. The lies happen when you ask people why.

Why is this happening?