By Nomi Prins Posted December 20, 2019 Here’s Nomi Prins with the latest analysis on the Fed’s repo market action. Even before the pandemic, only the richest 20% of American households had recovered fully (or, in the case of the truly wealthy, more than fully) from the financial crisis. For more of Frank, check out -side-of-midnight-with-frank-morano/">"The Other Side of Midnight", heard 1-5AM on 77 WABC.

In some papers, after all, reports on the reaction to Welles's performance were set right next to news of war clouds brewing in Europe and Asia. Twenty-first-century tycoons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos raked it in specifically because of all the money pouring into shares of their stock. Follow us for first access to the latest news and analysis. The planet's 2,200 or so billionaires got wealthier by $1.9 trillion in 2020 alone and were worth about $11.4 trillion in mid-December 2020 (up from $9.5 trillion a year earlier). The Fed's green light for this activity on December 18th will allow mega-banks to return to those share buybacks (which constitute 70% of the capital payout that they provide shareholders). Subscribe Truthout's Latest Our daily email newsletter will keep you up to date. Find out why the real story Wall Street is… And yet, American billionaires scored monumentally during the pandemic, due particularly to their lofty position in the stock market. There had already been surprises galore. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. That's mostly because since that crisis, fewer households had participated in the stock market or owned real estate and so had no chance to capitalize on increases in the values of either. Total federal revenue was $3.45 trillion, while the corporate tax part of that was just $221 billion, or a paltry 6.4%. That's plain math and it's the ugly essence of the United States of America as 2021 begins. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. And it's not hard to understand why they might have done so at that moment. That added nearly eight million Americans to the ranks of the poor, even as America's 659 billionaires held double the wealth of the 165 million poorest Americans. Indeed, the combined net worth of the top 1% of Americans was $34.2 trillion (about one-third of all U.S. household wealth), while the total for the bottom half was $2.1 trillion (or 1.9% of that wealth). It was also still reeling from the fiery Hindenburg disaster of 1937 in which a German airship blew up in New Jersey, as well as from the escalation of tensions and hostilities in both Asia and Europe that would lead to World War II. Truthout is a nonprofit and depends on your financial support. In the midst of a pandemic, as billionaires only grow richer and the markets soar, can there be any question that we're experiencing a Martian invasion? Atlanta – Confirming what many…, Sure, the quote in the over-title is only my fantasy. On the other side of reality, I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that, according to recent Federal Reserve reports, the U.S. wealth gap continued to widen dramatically as economic inequality increased yet again in 2020 thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. The former Cuban leader can’t seem to stop himself from talking about…, To donate by check, phone, bitcoin, or other method, see our, Army Suicides Hit Record and Will Likely Continue to Rise, Army Corps Liable for Katrina Damage, US Court Finds, The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give (but Won’t), The “New” Population Control Craze: Retro, Racist, Wrong Way to Go, Deb Price | Census Bureau Begins to Set a Good Example, Pakistan Suicide Bomb in Peshawar Kills at Least 19, Even Fidel Has a (Political) Crush on Obama. Today, the top 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the whole of the middle class, a phenomenon first true in 2010 and still the reality of our moment. Associated Press articles: Copyright © 2016 The Associated Press. A Microsoft 365 subscription offers an ad-free interface, custom domains, enhanced security options, the full desktop version of Office, and 1 TB of cloud storage. Find out why the real story Wall Street is… The more that corporations keep relative to their bottom line when compared with ordinary citizens, the more the stock market rises relative to the real economy. Sometimes these programs block e-mail you want to get. In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Appeal is expected. In June 2020, the Fed had banned the practice ostensibly to help them better navigate risks caused by the pandemic. If you want to grasp inequality in the pandemic moment, consider this: while the market soared, more than 25.5 million Americans were the recipients of federal unemployment benefits. This News section gives analysis of all the markets including stocks, bonds, gold, silver, housing, interest rates, inflation and overall health of the general economy. E-mail and Internet companies use blockers to stop spam. Meanwhile, as 2020 ended, the richest 10% of Americans owned more than 88% of the outstanding shares of companies and mutual funds in the U.S. The size of the public debt issued by the Treasury Department reached $27.5 trillion. We're a long way from a world that puts investment in the real economy ahead of those soaring financial markets. From the Financial Crisis to the Pandemic. Frank Morano interviews newsmakers on the issues of the day, gives his two cents on the world at large, with a refreshing independent perspective, and manages to give listeners a chuckle from time to time with some personal stories that you have to hear to believe. At the moment, the focus is on economic and health-related fears in all-too-ample supply. But if they fail to address the divide between rich and poor,…, Army Corps’ “myopic” maintenance of a shipping channel led to levee failure, much Katrina damage, US court judge rules. Beautiful patterns for hand embroidery and quilting. All rights reserved. What that means is that in an ever more unequal America, 93.6% of the money flowing into the government's till comes from individuals, not corporations. Doug Casey is an American-born libertarian economist and advocate of the free market. It is also on the disconnect that exists between the real economic world that most of us live in and turbo-boosted stock markets. After all, we're in a pandemic age in which the gaps between the rich, the poor, and the middle class are being reinforced in endlessly stunning ways, a world in which some people have the means to remain remarkably safe, secure, and alive, while others have no means at all. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, aided by an ultra-loose monetary policy, steadily rose from a financial-crisis low of 6,926 on March 5, 2009 to 27,090 by March 4, 2020, which was when Covid-19 briefly trashed its rally. Nomi Prins Nomi Prins is the author of Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (Nation Books). The market doesn't care about politics. The U.S. government doled out $738 billion to the Pentagon for fiscal year 2020. These distorted markets are the result of wealth inequality that once would have been unimaginable in this country. While markets leapt to record highs, poverty in the United States also rose last year from 9.3% in June to 11.7% in November 2020. As Martians "invaded" New Jersey (it had been London in the novel) with mayhem in mind, panic evidently ensued among some radio listeners who thought they were hearing perfectly real reports about an alien invasion of Planet Earth. Julian West, looking backwards from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart. Later accounts suggest that the media blew that reaction out of proportion ("fake news," 1938-style? By the end of December 2020, its balance sheet had increased by $3.164 trillion, reaching a total of $7.35 trillion, 63% more than its book at the height of the decade following the 2008 disaster. We ask that you add us to your trusted list of senders, contacts or address book. That's because the health and economic devastation it inflicted affected low-wage service workers, low-income earners, and people of color so much more than the upper-middle class and elite upper class. No one in Washington — no less President Obama — ever said, “This administration ended, rather than extended,…, It’s back to the bad old days of the population bomb. The book was written in the Gilded Age, when rapid economic growth, particularly in the United States, bred a new class of "robber barons." Wells evokes a species — humanity — rendered helpless in the face of a force greater than itself and beyond its control. By Nomi Prins Posted December 20, 2019 Here’s Nomi Prins with the latest analysis on the Fed’s repo market action. Those very financial institutions can now pour money into purchasing their own stocks again rather than, say, into loans to struggling small businesses endangered by pandemic-instigated economic disaster. Those at the top ferociously accumulated wealth, while the majority of the rest of the population barely got by or drowned. The contracts to defense-related private companies in the last year for which data was available, fiscal year 2018, totaled roughly 62% of a full defense budget of $579 billion, or $358 billion. Remember that, long before Covid-19 hit, the financial crisis of 2008 was met by a multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout. In essentially another universe, the number of people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic and didn't regain them was about 10 million. But the reality is that the more those Fed-inflated assets grow relative to real ones, the greater the inequality gap. Expand your Outlook. The top 1% also controlled more than 88 times the wealth of the bottom 50% of Americans. Now, for reasons you'll soon understand, take a little trip back in history with me to the eve of Halloween, 1938, when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre dramatized his adaptation of H.G. Meanwhile, again in the thoroughly cheery news column, banks in 2021 will be able to resume their march toward billions of dollars in share buybacks, courtesy of the Federal Reserve opting to support such a bank-and-stock-market stimulus. And the pandemic is, in the end, only exacerbating, sometimes in radical ways, problems that already were bad enough, particularly economic inequality. Perhaps people already equated or conflated the Martian invasion on the radio with fantasies about a potential German invasion of this country. Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer’s striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. But he also promised a “professional” cabinet, something the Obama Administration and others have…, Eric Stoner responds to Stephen Zunes: Yes, nonviolent movements have achieved important democratic and political reforms. Paradigm Press provides actionable advice based on our editors’ alternative paradigms — their mental models and worldview. And that figure doesn't even count people who can't go to work because they have to take care of others, their workplace is restricted, or they're home-schooling their kids. Support Independent Journalism Truthout is a nonprofit and depends on your financial support. We've developed a suite of premium Outlook features for people with advanced email and calendar needs. Other mega-banks followed suit, as did their share prices. Peshawar has seen near-daily bombings…, The whole world appears to be fascinated by Barack Obama, and Fidel Castro is no exception. Inequality is about the disparity between people and countries with respect to income, wealth, or power. In a way, economically speaking, you might say that today we're suffering the equivalent of an invasion from Mars. Truthout Russ Baker: Multiply Your Force! The more that individuals, rather than corporations, shoulder the burden of tax revenues, the greater the inherent inequality in society. By 2020, there were bidding wars for suburban houses by urbanites seeking refuge from coronavirus-stricken cities with all-cash offers, something beyond the reach of most traditional buyers. Get daily news, in-depth reporting and critical analysis from the journalists, activists and thinkers who are working to improve our world.. Suicides among veterans and soldiers have reached a record high this year and are set to continue rising, Pentagon officials said. It's not hard these days to imagine the chaos people would feel if their lives or livelihoods were threatened by an external, uncontrollable force like those Martians. In other words, the real problem when it comes to inequality isn't the total amount of taxes received versus money spent in a time of crisis, but the composition of federal revenue that's wildly out of whack (something the pandemic has only made worse). This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Its own assets then rose from $870 billion to $4.5 trillion between August 2007 and August 2015. As it happens, I'm thinking about reality, the very American and global reality clearly repeating itself as 2021 begins. The Fed can focus on its inflation-versus-full-employment dual-mandate all it wants, while pushing policies that distort the value of the real economy compared to financial assets. It's a creature that acts in accordance with the goals of its largest participants. More sobering than all of this: more than 360,000 Americans (and counting) have already lost their lives as a result of Covid-19 with, according to public health experts, far more to come. The majority of nonfinancial assets in that mix was in real estate. Though Congress passed two much-needed Covid-related stimulus packages that extended unemployment benefits, while offering two one-off payments and a Paycheck Protection Program support for smaller businesses, the impact of those acts paled in comparison to the tax breaks and power of investment the stock market provided the well-off and corporate kingpins. MORE FROM Nomi Prins. Through our free e-letters and paid publications, we publish our editors’ paradigms in direct challenge to the mainstream paradigms that guide our world today… Like the paradigms taught by economics PhDs in the world’s top universities. And yet, as if in some galaxy far, far away, there also turns out to be another, so much more upbeat side to this equation. The announcement, coming on the day that…. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. We all know, of course, that we're living through a once-in-a-century-style pandemic; that millions of people have lost their jobs, a portion of which will never return; that the poorest among us, who can withstand such acute economic hardship the least, have been slammed the hardest; and that the global economy has been kneecapped, thanks to a battery of lockdowns, shutdowns, restrictions of various sorts, and health-related concerns. Sometimes things only make sense when seen through a magnifying lens. The gap between incoming and outgoing federal funds rose, too. Email. Our daily email newsletter will keep you up to date. On the other hand, the U.S. economy never quite reached a growth level of, on average, more than 2% annually in the years after that near collapse, even as the stock market regained all its losses and so much more. Wells' 1898 sci-fi-meets-dystopia-meets-imperialism novel, The War of the Worlds, on the radio. Afghanistan Presidsent Hamid Karzai promised to tackle corruption in his inaugural speech on Thursday. By 2018, about 75% of the $113 trillion in aggregate U.S. household assets were financial ones; that is, tied up in stocks, ETF's, 401Ks, IRAs, mutual funds, and similar investments. A crisis of inequality had been sparked by the Industrial Revolution itself, which started in England and then crossed the Atlantic. Nomi Prins, AlterNet November 18, 2009. “The present is a period of riots,” writes Alain Bertho. The more that financial assets appreciate on money seeking to multiply itself in the quickest way possible (think of it as like a virus), the greater the distortion created. Now imagine this: that amount alone dwarfed the total of all corporate taxes flowing into the U.S. Treasury in 2019. He is a bestselling financial author, international investor, entrepreneur, and the founder and chairman of Casey Research, a provider of subscription financial analysis about specific market verticals including natural resources/metals/mining, energy, commodities, and technology. As a result, the Fed incentivized those with extra money to grow it through quicker, often riskier investments in the stock market or real estate. Much of the appreciation in stock market and real-estate values has been directly or indirectly related to the Fed's actions. Like the twenty-first-century version of such beings, they, too, made money from their money, while the economic status of workers slipped ever lower. That was the title of an alarmist book by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich that appeared in 1968.…, The 2010 Census will have a new message for same-sex married couples like Joyce and me: “You count.” Reflecting a refreshingly new era at the Census…, The suicide bomb near a Peshawar courthouse in Pakistan could have killed more if the attacker had been able to enter the building. However, within a month of the market dip that followed widespread shutdowns, its climb was refortified by similar but larger maneuvers, as Federal Reserve policy was once again deployed to save the rich under the auspices of saving the economy. ------------------------------------------, multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout. And as if by magic, those shares leapt 5% that very day. Rally 2.0 took the Dow to a new record of 30,606.48 as 2020 closed. The U.S. deficit increased by $3.3 trillion during 2020. By the late nineteenth century, America's "robber barons" were insanely wealthy. In 1810, the top 1% of Americans held 25% of the country's total wealth; between 1870 and 1910 that share leapt to 45%. The S&P 500 stock market index added a total of $14 trillionin market value in 2020. Take the defense sector, for example. The world, after all, had barely recovered from the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. Nomi Prins. His depiction of the grim relationship between the Martians and the humans they were suppressing (meant to remind readers of the relationship between British imperialists and those they suppressed in distant lands) cast an eerie light on the power and wealth gap in Great Britain and around the world at the turn of the twentieth century. As economist Thomas Piketty wrote, there was a steeper increase in wealth inequality during the Gilded Age than ever before in American history. As soon as Wall Street got the good news from the Fed as 2020 ended, JPMorgan Chase, the nation's biggest bank, wasted no time in announcing its intent to buy a staggering $30 billion of its own shares in the new year. Its ultra-loose policies made it cheaper to borrow money, but not as attractive to invest it in low-interest-rate, less risky securities like Treasury bonds. Covid-19 is not, of course, from Mars or sent by aliens, but in terms of its impact, it's as if it were. SALON ® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. It was an early version of a zero-sum game in which the spoils of the system were increasingly beyond the reach of so many. Donate And though many larger and mid-size corporations filed for bankruptcy protection due to coronavirus related shutdowns, the brunt of absolute closures hit smaller local businesses — from restaurants to hair salons to health-and-wellness shops — much harder, only exacerbating economic disparity at the community level. Simply put, the less you had, the less you could afford to lose any of it. As Covid-19 grew ever worse while 2020 ended, the stock market reached heights that hadn't been seen before. The real economy, on the other hand, requires far more effort — planning, prioritizing, and executing programs and projects that can produce tangible profits. ), yet people who tuned in late and missed the set-up about the fictitious nature of the program did indeed panic. Ever. Copyright © 2021 Salon.com, LLC. That gap, in fact, might as well be like the distance between Earth and Mars. With or without Welles, people were on edge. Even bipartisan congressional stimulus measures meant for necessary relief turned into a chance to elevate fortunes at the highest echelons of society. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. 917 talking about this. Fill your life with handmade heirlooms. At the same time, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero, while purchasing U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds from the very banks that had sparked the disaster. Whatever the case, fear has been both a great motivator and an anxiety provoker when it comes to the media, whether in 1938 or today.
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