“655 people have $4 trillion in wealth. 200 million can’t cover a $1000 expense.”
Scoop Publisher Francesco Abbruzzino
The COVID pandemic has caused the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us to grow larger than it ever has been before. Thanks to the hyperinflationary policies of the Federal Reserve and our politicians in Washington, stock prices have soared to unprecedented heights in recent months. This pushed the wealth of the uber-rich to dizzying heights, but for the rest of the country 2020 was an unmitigated nightmare. As I have discussed previously, one survey found that 2020 was a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans. More than 110,000 restaurants shut down permanently last year, Americans filed more than 70 million claims for unemployment benefits, and tens of millions are potentially facing eviction in 2021. But even though we are mired in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, those at the very top of the economic pyramid are laughing all the way to the bank.
Earlier today, I came across a tweet from Sven Heinrich that really struck an emotional chord with me…
655 people have $4 trillion in wealth.
200 million can’t cover a $1000 expense.
I certainly don’t have any problem with people gaining wealth by working extremely hard and making society a better place in the process.
But most of the people at the very top of the economic pyramid only increased their wealth in 2020 because the powers that be decided to open up the firehoses and rain obscene amounts of money on them.
That isn’t right.
As a result of the deeply flawed policies that were implemented because of the COVID pandemic, the gap between “gains in financial assets and the health of the economy” was the largest ever recorded last year…
But as stock market indexes staged a huge rebound from the lows seen in March when the pandemic first hit, the gap between the wealthy and the poor extended an already widening trend to historic proportions.
A report via BofA Global Research published on Friday notes that a measure of the differential between gains in financial assets and the health of the economy hit a record at 6.3X in 2020.
My regular readers are probably sick and tired of hearing me say that the stock market has become completely divorced from economic reality, and now we have a hard number which backs up what I have been saying all along.
