Who has all the money??

[rennigade]

Who has all the money?

For those who'd rather not click a hyperlink...go to break.com and search, who has all the money.

I certainly didn't realize the distribution of wealth was this crazy.

A little snip from it...The 1%ers control 40% of the nations wealth...the 80% of the other people control 7% of the nations wealth between all of them!

Its crazy to think that if you added up everyones wealth below the "rich" people, 80% of the nation...is almost 6 times lower than the 1%ers.

Pretty mind bending considering most if not all people on this forum are the 80%...we're hardly a blip on the radar.

[greenskeeper]

So what exactly is your point? Are you buying into owebama's wealth redistribution schemes?

[rennigade]

There is no point. I simply thought it was interesting...and considering this forum is kind of about money...I thought it would be appropriate to post this, in the general discussion area...where random things are discussed/shared...in the general discussion area.

Something tells me you should get back to that leftover half can of warm budweiser. Have fun with that.

[hamchan]

When you consider the fact that wealth distribution has been rapidly changing in this direction for quite some time, it would suggest there is something very fundamentally broken about our system which needs to be addressed.

[bigdaddybus]

Pretty mind bending considering most if not all people on this forum are the 80%...we're hardly a blip on the radar.

I find these sort of videos facinating.

BTW according to the link below the 80% you mentioned are those in the US with household incomes less than $91,202. Actually that is not a surprising number to me, and it sounds about right. It's the astounding salaries that the 1% make that is mind numbing to me.

http://www.mybudget360.com/how-much-does-the-average-american-make-breaking-down-the-us-household-income-numbers/

[KTP]

I am in the 19% and we get the shaft. No free phones and no private jet.

[bigdaddybus]

I am in the 19% and we get the shaft. No free phones and no private jet.

Ditto

The 19% is a heck of a range too $91,203-$1,599,999.... Not exactly one social class there

[cardtrick]

Not fair how skewed it all is. At the same time, not fair to take away money from people who have legally earned it.

[feh]

It's very simple: money equals power and influence. It could be argued the US is a plutocracy.

The ironic thing is that policies that favor the wealthy are so short-sighted. To have a healthy, growing economy, you need a viable middle class. The exact opposite is happening.

[atomicrc11]

This cannot go on forever as eventually the lower and middle class will run out of money for the rich to take. Then things will self correct. Hopefully in way such that we don't have a full scale revolution. It's funny how these things happen again and again.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

I'm also not advocating anything disruptive, but the changes in society certainly seem to be leading us in this direction. Regardless of your political view the disparity in wealth should concern you.

[J.Apple902]

Here is the reality. Since the inception of the Federal Reserve Bill in 1913, our political agenda has always been in the favor of banking. The Federal Reserve is a private bank with private undisclosed shareholders who have total control of interest rates and the printing of USD currency. Typically the Secretary of the US Treasury has been the once CEO of Goldman Sachs, and quite often there are several ex-members of Goldman and other banking institutions in the White House Reagan choose the once CEO of Merril Lynch. Generally several Ivy League Deans of their Business School sits at the White House as well (think rankings). Our political system is rife with conflicts of interest.

Since the creation of fractional reserve banking, which allows banks to keep just 10% of their “on the books” assets at hand, bankers have gotten super rich. If a bank has a $10,000 purse, it can write out $90,000 worth of loans, bc they are merely required to have 10% on reserve. This means at, say a 5% interest, they are actually getting 50%. Once banks got into more business besides simply holding $ and writing loans, they got into investment banking and all types of other securities trading and boom, today you have modern finance. This has allowed the banking sector to become ridiculously wealthy. The four biggest banks in the world each own one of the four largest oil companies. I know JPM Chase owns BP, the other first banks are BofA, Citi, and Wells Fargo. Each owns either Shell, Exxon Mobile, or Chevron – I cannot remember which respectively. It is actually speculated that most of JPM Chase, the biggest bank in the world, is owned primarly by Rothschild shareholders. Upon the death of JP Morgan himself, it was public record that he only held 19% stake.

Also, examine US policy in recent years. The largest welfare check in the history of the US was written to Wall Street - $700B post 2008. If you live in a world where you can bet the bank, leverage yourself 33:1 like Lehman and Bear Stearns, go bankrupt on bad $ like AIG, or Merril Lynch, you name it, and then get rescued by taxpaper money? Most would do the same. You can go to Vegas, win for a while, probably keep most of the winnings, and then if you fail, get rescued. If anyone really wanted to do the right thing with that money, it would have been to inject US Treasury funds into the banks, and have them become partially public/private – but US policy would never hinder bankers.

Everyone knew what was going on. The institutions writing the mortgages leading up to 2008 knew that the lenders would never be able to pay. They took out credit default sway insurance, buddling the band loans into CDOs, and traded them around the world. The institutions responsible for giving credit ratings gave AID, Fannie May and Freddie Mac AAA ratings leading into the recent crash. lol? how? Everyone knew.

I am using very recent examples of why our financial sector is a pretty scary place. All of this stuff is public record and simple, facts & data.

[ua_guy]

Here is the reality. Since the inception of the Federal Reserve Bill in 1913, our political agenda has always been in the favor of banking. The Federal Reserve is a private bank with private undisclosed shareholders who have total control of interest rates and the printing of USD currency. Typically the Secretary of the US Treasury has been the once CEO of Goldman Sachs, and quite often there are several ex-members of Goldman and other banking institutions in the White House Reagan choose the once CEO of Merril Lynch. Generally several Ivy League Deans of their Business School sits at the White House as well (think rankings). Our political system is rife with conflicts of interest.

Since the creation of fractional reserve banking, which allows banks to keep just 10% of their “on the books” assets at hand, bankers have gotten super rich. If a bank has a $10,000 purse, it can write out $90,000 worth of loans, bc they are merely required to have 10% on reserve. This means at, say a 5% interest, they are actually getting 50%. Once banks got into more business besides simply holding $ and writing loans, they got into investment banking and all types of other securities trading and boom, today you have modern finance. This has allowed the banking sector to become ridiculously wealthy. The four biggest banks in the world each own one of the four largest oil companies. I know JPM Chase owns BP, the other first banks are BofA, Citi, and Wells Fargo. Each owns either Shell, Exxon Mobile, or Chevron – I cannot remember which respectively. It is actually speculated that most of JPM Chase, the biggest bank in the world, is owned primarly by Rothschild shareholders. Upon the death of JP Morgan himself, it was public record that he only held 19% stake.

Also, examine US policy in recent years. The largest welfare check in the history of the US was written to Wall Street - $700B post 2008. If you live in a world where you can bet the bank, leverage yourself 33:1 like Lehman and Bear Stearns, go bankrupt on bad $ like AIG, or Merril Lynch, you name it, and then get rescued by taxpaper money? Most would do the same. You can go to Vegas, win for a while, probably keep most of the winnings, and then if you fail, get rescued. If anyone really wanted to do the right thing with that money, it would have been to inject US Treasury funds into the banks, and have them become partially public/private – but US policy would never hinder bankers.

Everyone knew what was going on. The institutions writing the mortgages leading up to 2008 knew that the lenders would never be able to pay. They took out credit default sway insurance, buddling the band loans into CDOs, and traded them around the world. The institutions responsible for giving credit ratings gave AID, Fannie May and Freddie Mac AAA ratings leading into the recent crash. lol? how? Everyone knew.

I am using very recent examples of why our financial sector is a pretty scary place. All of this stuff is public record and simple, facts & data.

Exactly this.

To take it to a personal level, when few hands control the big levers -- pricing, wages, money, and the labor markets, that's pretty much the opposite of what we'd consider to be a free country, or even a free market.