Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
My Favorite Graph of 2014: The Rise and Rise of the Top 0.1 Percent
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/12/31/best_graph_of_2014_the_rise_and_rise_of_top_0_1.html
This Hermes handbag has 242 diamonds on it. You know, because there's a market for that sort of thing now.
The door is just about to shut on 2014, so I wanted to take this last opportunity to fulfill my solemn obligation as an econ blogger and nominate my favorite graph of the year. No other image, in my opinion, so succinctly captures the skyrocketing fortunes of America's super-rich than the chart below, included in an October working paper by economists Emmanuel Saez, of the University of California Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman, of the London School of Economics and Political Science (who you may know as some of Thomas Piketty's favorite academic bandmates). In 2012, the top 0.1 percent of households lay claim to 22 percent of U.S. wealth, up from about 7 percent in 1979. Or, as I put it when I wrote about a rough draft of their findings in April, one-thousandth of the country now owns more than one-fifth of its wealth.
What does this graph tell us that we didn't already know? A lot. For a long while, there was something puzzling about our statistics on economic inequality. The data showed that the top 1 percent of earners were gobbling up a larger and larger share of U.S. income over the past three decades, yet had not vastly increased their share of U.S. wealth. How could that be? Well, it was possible that America's moderately rich were blowing away their paychecks trying to keep pace with the super rich. Also, it takes a while to accumulate assets, even if you're earning money hand-over-fist—so another answer was that the wealth gap might just be a lagging indicator of our economic polarization.
But Saez and Zucman suggest that there wasn't much of a puzzle to be solved at all. We just weren't looking at the data the right way.
The U.S. doesn't tax wealth directly, so economists have long had to rely on somewhat roundabout methods to estimate how it's distributed. One important source of information has been the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. Another are estate tax records, which Saez had previously analyzed with Columbia University's Wojciech Kopczuk. A third were magazine rankings of billionaires, such as the Forbes 400, believe it or not. But each of those resources had its flaws. Despite their heroic efforts to oversample affluent households, surveys like the Fed's tend to miss many of the ultra-wealthy. Meanwhile, for methodological reasons, the fact that lifespans seem to be increasing faster for the rich than for other Americans may distort the results obtained by examining estate taxes. And as for magazine rankings, well, they're produced by journalists. Let's be real.
28 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
...per David Stockman, Pruneface's budget guru. To get his figures, Stockman must've added up all the GDP and estimated the stuff from the middle ages. Whatever. His real point is that most of THAT has ended up in the pockets of the greedhead plutocrats' pockets.
In 1985, the top five percent of the households – the wealthiest five percent – had net worth of $8 trillion – which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five per cent have net worth of $40 trillion. The top five per cent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980.” -- David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7009217n&tag=related;photovideo
"In 1985, the top five percent of the households, wealthiest five percent, had net worth of $8 trillion, which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five percent have net worth of $40 trillion," he explained. "The top five percent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980." -- David Stockman
SOURCE: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/28/60minutes/main6999906_page4.shtml
How much of it is offshore? And to think there are kids in America who would go to bed hungry every night if they had one.
What you see is the surge by the global elite (the top 0.1, 0.01, etc. would be doing even better than his top 1), plus the dramatic rise of many but not all people in emerging markets. In between is what Branko suggests corresponds to the US lower-middle class, but what I’d say corresponds to advanced-country working classes in general, at least if you add post-2008 data with the effects of austerity.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/recent-history-in-one-chart/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body
globalization. Nowadays it's easy for an oligarch to move enormous piles of money and his entire worldly existence if necessary to a "friendlier" country oceans away that beckons with open arms.
That's the other half of that story, IMO.
Wealth of world’s 400 richest billionaires rose $92 billion in 2014
Figure hits $4.1 trillion
By Andre Damon
wsws.org, 3 January 2015
The wealthiest 400 people in the world saw their combined net worth grow by $92 billion last year, hitting $4.1 trillion. The bonanza for the super-rich was underwritten by governments and central banks around the world, which fueled surging stock markets and record corporate profits by pumping hundreds of billions into the financial markets.
The figures were provided by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which was initiated in 2012 and tracks the wealth of the 400 richest people in the world.
The combined net worth of these 400 individuals is greater than the gross domestic product of Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world. The average net worth of each of the billionaires grew by $240 million, to $10.25 billion.
Since the 2008 financial crash, which triggered multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts and the infusion into the financial system of trillions more in virtually free cash, the wealth of the super-rich has nearly doubled. The net worth of the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans increased from $1.27 trillion in 2009 to $2.29 trillion in 2014.
SNIP...
Investor Warren Buffett, the world’s second richest man, according to the Bloomberg list, saw his wealth grow to $74.5 billion, up by $13.7 billion, or more than 22 percent, in the past year. Buffett’s wealth has more than doubled since 2009.
Bloomberg noted that “dozens of operating businesses the 84-year-old chairman bought over the past five decades churned out record profit” over the past year. Buffett’s business model has been to buy traditional industries such as railroads and food producers, then ruthlessly cut costs, making billions in the process. Buffett’s businesses have profited handsomely from the ongoing fall in labor costs, which have been dropping year after year since 2008 as a result of falling wages and cuts in benefits for workers.
CONTINUED...
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/03/bill-j03.html
Happy Daze Are Here Again.
