Tag: wealth inequality

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

It’s time to be our own heroes, because those in charge sure won’t be…

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, things weren’t all that great for the bottom 90% of households.

The median household was barely scraping by with ultra-low financial reserves, meager retirement savings and high levels of debt. All while being relentlessly crushed by cost of living inflation running far higher than the blatantly fraudulent government statistics offered up by the BLS.

Even more infuriating, the economic pie was preferentially handed to the top 10% — well, more specifically, to the top 1%. And even more dramatically to the top 0.1%.  Don’t even get me started on the 0.001%…

(Source)

Continue reading “Martenson: We Are On Our Own In The Post-COVID World”

Authored by Chris Andrew and Mustafa Zaidi of Clarmond Wealth

A Time To Howl

“No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, or wiser than its most ignorant,” declared Henry George the American economic writer of the late 19th century. His book of 1879 ‘Progress and Poverty’ focused on how economic inequality actually increased with technological progress; the book sold 3m copies.

Henry George sounds like a modern-day liberal; he advocated for the secret ballot, a universal basic income, women’s suffrage, the abolishment of creditor enforcement, an Old Testament style debt jubilee, limited military spending, free public libraries, a mass public transport system, a restriction on political spending, the elimination of monopolies and debt free money. This was all to be funded by taxing land and not labor.

Continue reading “Clarmond: “We Need Progressives In Power, Followed By World War, Hyperinflation, Boom, Bust, And Finally Depression””

Authored by Ben Hunt via EpsilonTheory.com,

Yeah, It’s Still Water

Back in April, I wrote This Is Water.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

– David Foster Wallace (2005)

It’s a note about financialization … the zombiefication of our economy and the oligarchification of our society.

Financialization is profit margin growth without labor productivity growth.

Financialization is the zero-sum game aspect of capitalism, where profit margin growth is both pulled forward from future real growth and pulled away from current economic risk-taking.

Continue reading “The Last 10 Years Have Been “An Unparalled Transfer Of Wealth To The Managerial Class””

“There was time when average Americans could be counted upon to know correctly whether the country was going up or down, because in those days when America prospered, the American people prospered as well. These days things are different.

Let’s look at it in a statistical sense. If you look at it from the middle of the 1930’s (the Depression) up until the year 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population of this country, what you might call the American people, that group took home 70 percent of the growth in the country’s income. If you look at the same numbers from 1997 up until now, from the height of the great Dot Com bubble up to the present, you will find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of this country’s income growth at all.

Our share of these great good times was zero, folks. The upper ten percent of the population, by which we mean our country’s financiers and managers and professionals, consumed the entire thing. To be a young person in America these days is to understand instinctively the downward slope that so many of us are on.”

Thomas Frank, Kansas City Missouri, 6 April 2017

“When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Via Marketwatch

A study puts wealth inequality in a historical perspective

It’s not fashionable to wear flapper dresses and do the Charleston, but 1920s-style wealth inequality is definitely back in style.

New research says America’s ultra-rich haven’t held as much of the country’s wealth since the Jazz Age, those freewheeling times before the country’s finances shattered.

“U.S. wealth concentration seems to have returned to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties,” wrote Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Continue reading “It’s been almost 100 years since America’s 1% had this much wealth”

In recent decades, extreme world poverty has declined significantly and many millions of people have joined the swelling ranks of the middle class – particularly in China.

While these economic shifts are positive, it’s the other end of the global wealth spectrum that attracts the most attention. A high degree of wealth creation is amassed by those at the top of the economic pyramid.

Continue reading “Visualizing the Extreme Concentration of Global Wealth”

Guest Post by Chris Hedges

At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school for the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans for the next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their cloying sense of entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy because they were smarter and more talented. They had a sneering disdain for those ranked below them in material and social status, even the merely rich. Most of the uber-rich lacked the capacity for empathy and compassion. They formed elite cliques that hazed, bullied and taunted any nonconformist who defied or did not fit into their self-adulatory universe.

Continue reading “The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Tyranny or Revolution”

You will find more infographics at Statista

Continue reading “Where Financial Inequality Is Rampant”

by Tyler Durden

Sep 27, 2017 4:55 PM

Today, the Federal Reserve released its triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) which collects information about family incomes, net worth, balance sheet components, credit use, and other financial outcomes.  A superficial flip through the first few pages of the 2016 SCF as most will do, reveals “broad-based gains in income and net worth since the previous time the survey was conducted, in 2013” as the Fed puts it. Unfortunately, reading between the lines reveals that while net worth and income did increase in the past three years, it was exclusively for the “top 10%” of Americans. The “bottom 90%” got virtually nothing of this so-called recovery.

Continue reading “Fed Stunner: Top 1% Of Americans Are 70% Wealthier Than The Bottom 90%”

Guest Post by The Zman

We live in an age of great inequality. In fact, some economist think America may have greater inequality now than at any time in human history. Americans don’t think about it too much, as generations of indoctrination about class envy have made questioning such things seem un-American. That and the middle-class may be swamped with debt, but they have all the trappings of prosperity. Even poor people in this country are fat. People tend to worry about how much the rich man has, only when their bellies are growling.

Continue reading “The BQ”