by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
If you have enough money, you can buy just about anything. And when you are in a position where you can buy just about anything, you wield an enormous amount of raw power. Today, our world is completely and utterly dominated by those at the very top of the economic pyramid. Those in the top one percent of the top one percent are pretty much able to do whatever they want, and the rest of us are pretty much powerless to stop them. Unfortunately, the gap between the ultra-wealthy elite and the rest of us just continues to get even larger. Last year, the total wealth of the world’s millionaires reached a staggering 86.8 trillion dollars…
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The world has never had so many rich people and their investments in soaring stock markets have made them wealthier than ever recorded, according to a study published on Wednesday.
The number of “high net worth individuals” (HNWI) — defined as people with liquid assets of at least $1 million — rose by 5.1 percent last year to 22.8 million, according to consulting firm Capgemini.
Their total wealth reached $86.8 trillion in 2023, a 4.7 percent increase from the previous year, according to the annual World Wealth Report.
Meanwhile, 5 billion people have gotten poorer since the start of the pandemic…
Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost 5 billion people globally have become poorer.
How much power do the hundreds of millions of people around the world that are living on less than two dollars a day have compared to the billionaires in the western world that are constantly making headlines?
The truth is that they run the world and the rest of us are just living in it.
Here in the United States, the colossal gap between CEO pay and worker pay got even larger last year…
Bosses have always made more money than workers. But the gap between CEOs and employees is growing.
The median CEO in the S&P 500 was paid 196 times as much as the median employee in 2023, according to an analysis by Equilar and The Associated Press.
That’s up from a ratio of 185 in 2022.
It would be a good thing if the rich were getting richer as long as everyone else was getting richer as well.
But instead, poverty is literally exploding all around us.
In 2020, there were approximately 140 homeless camps in Oakland, California.
Since that time, the city has closed 537 homeless camps, but there are still approximately 1,500 remaining all over the city…
Oakland officials passed a policy in 2020 to regulate homeless encampments when there were about 140 camps. The policy was created to prohibit encampments in specific areas of the city, including proximity to businesses, schools, playgrounds, traffic lanes, bike paths, housing and playgrounds.
Any encampments in those prohibited areas were supposed to be vacated, with the city offering shelter before evacuating the camp.
Since then, the city has closed 537 homeless camps with approximately 1,500 remaining, according to a city report.
I feel so bad for the law-abiding citizens that still live in Oakland.
Conditions have become so precarious that one construction company actually “refused to finish its pothole paving job because it got ‘too dangerous’ for its workers”…
Frustrated Oakland residents are in the hole after a construction crew quit and refused to finish its pothole paving job because it got ‘too dangerous’ for its workers – as other businesses flee the Bay Area over the same concerns.
Residents in the Sobrante Park area in East Oakland said they weren’t even notified after the third-party general contractor decided to abandon the project before repaving the streets, leaving large potholes and dangerous loose gravel all over the neighborhood since mid-May.
If you still have a nice home and plenty of money, good for you.
But you should understand that you are solidly in the minority at this point.
Of course our politicians care far more about the economic health of the elite than anyone else, because it is the elite that fund their campaigns.
So even though just about all the rest of us have seen our standard of living go way down, in recent years there has been an all-out effort to prop up the stock market because that is where the elite have much of their wealth.
Today, the wealthiest 10 percent of all Americans own 93 percent of all the stocks.
And the poorest 50 percent of all Americans own just 1 percent of all the stocks.
The stock market wealth that the entire bottom half of the country controls is basically just a rounding error compared to the enormous holdings of the elite.
Unfortunately for the elite, it appears that trouble may be brewing for the financial markets…
The US stock market is shrinking, and investors are pulling their money out at a near-record pace as storm clouds gather over the US economy.
That means the titans of Wall Street may have to contend with choppy water as they cruise toward their Nantucket getaways this year.
In fact, Bank of America says that their customers have been pulling large amounts of money out of stocks for five consecutive weeks…
Bank of America analysts said on Tuesday that their clients have now been large net sellers of US stocks for five weeks in a row. Just last week, they sold off $5.7 billion more in stocks than they purchased, the highest outflow since last July.
Bank of America recorded the second largest sell-off of tech stocks in their history last week. And while one week does not a trend make, it does stand in stark contrast with the Magnificent Seven fervor that ensnared Wall Street mere months ago.
Whether it happens sooner or later, it is inevitable that America’s financial idols will come crashing down at some point.
But for most of the country, it feels like the economy has already crashed.
Our cost of living crisis has become exceedingly painful, our entire society is drowning in debt, and poverty and homelessness are exploding all around us.
Just about the only people that are still doing really well are those that are at the very top of the food chain.
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