Wolfstreet report – hoe Corona de rijken rijker maakte
Het Wolfstreet report bespreekt hoe gedurende deze crisis de rijken opnieuw rijker werden. En waarom dat een slechte zaak is voor een gezonde economie.
Ook tijdens de Corona-crisis werden de rijke opnieuw rijker.
Publicatie 16 augustus
Transcriptie
Over 30 million people lost their jobs while the wealth of America’s 600-plus billionaires ballooned by $434 billion, to $3.4 trillion.
The examples are all over the place. The wealth of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos soared by $74 billion so far this year, according to Bloomberg. Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth jumped by $20 billion so far this year. Elon Musk’s wealth soared by around $50 billion. The wealth of Microsoft founder Bill Gates jumped by $8 billion. Rob Walton, Jim Walton, and Alice Walton, of the Walmart family, saw their combined wealth jump by $14 billion. Chairman and CEO of mutual fund company Fidelity Investments, Abby Johnson, who owns nearly a quarter of the company, saw her wealth soar by $11 billion. The wealth of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin soared by $7 billion a piece, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s by $5 billion.
These are the wealth gains just this year.
Between mid-March and mid-May, during the lockdowns, the wealth of America’s 600-plus billionaires ballooned by $434 billion, according to a report by Americans for Tax Fairness, pushing the wealth of those 600 Americans to a combined $3.4 trillion.
And there is another layer of people who are not billionaires, but have a wealth of $50 million or $200 million, or $600 million, and they saw their enormous wealth balloon too during the pandemic. And there are millions of people of lesser wealth that also rode on their coattails up the boom of the financial markets.
The richest 10% of American households own 84% of the value of stocks owned by all households, according to Federal Reserve data. The remaining 90% of the households own 16% of the value of stocks. And the bottom half own nearly none.
And that boom in the stock market, the bond market, and other financial markets since mid-March happened because the Fed threw about $3 trillion at them in a short time, with the specific purpose of raising asset prices and making those folks whole so that they don’t have any skin in this pandemic.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell was asked directly at the FOMC press conference on July 29 about the Fed’s monetary policies’ effect on wealth inequality.
The funny thing is, Powell denied that the Fed’s monetary policies were responsible for this wholesale bailout of the wealthiest Americans causing an explosion of wealth inequality, but admitted out of the other side of his mouth, that the Fed’s monetary policies have caused asset prices to surge, and that was part of the goal of those purchases.
….
De rest van de transcriptie vindt u hier.
Enjoy reading WOLF STREET and want to support it? Using ad blockers – I totally get why – but want to support the site? You can donate. I appreciate it immensely. Click on the beer and iced-tea mug to find out how:
Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.
Eerdere afleveringen van het Wolfstreet report vindt u hier.