From Mokokoma Mokhonoana, philosopher, social critic, graphic designer, satirist, and iconoclast:
It is as difficult for most poor people to truly believe that they could someday escape poverty as it is for most wealthy people to truly believe that their wealth could someday escape them.
From John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-born economist, public official, and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism, The Affluent Society (1958):
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
Government is the greatest engine of wealth transfer ever invented. Not being a stickler for euphemism, SLL calls it theft, and so does Chris Martenson, at peakprosperity.com:
Spoiler alert! It’s already here.
In the past, I’ve warned about the coming Great Wealth Transfer. But now we need to talk about it in the present tense, because it’s here.
And it will only accelerate from here on out. The Rich will get richer at the expense of everybody else.
This isn’t personal. It’s simply a feature of what happens near the end of a debt-based monetary system run by corruptible humans.
Of course, those in charge don’t think of themselves as corrupted or villainous. I’m sure that Federal Reserve Chairs Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen all think of themselves as good and decent people doing “God’s work”. But the truth is they’ve irrevocably harmed millions — if not billions — of innocent people.
They and other central bankers have become the standard bearers of a system that can best be described as a reverse Robin Hood scheme, one that takes from the poor and gives to the Rich. It’s just that in this tale, the ‘poor’ means everybody not in the top 1%.
So you need to understand this wealth transfer process — how it works, who’s perpetrating it, and what dangers to watch for. If not, you’ll be a victim of it. And you’ll probably live in confusion and shock by how hard just ‘getting by’ becomes going forward.
Realizing that you’re being specifically targeted by a system determined to separate you from your wealth is the essential first step towards figuring out how to evade the predators and protect yourself.
The Great Wealth Transfer
What do we mean by a Wealth Transfer?
It isn’t just some academic concept. It’s a playbook that’s been used many times in the past by governments to forcibly extract wealth from the public and use it for the benefit of those in power.
To continue reading: The Coming Great Wealth Transfer
Ultimately, the service economy depends on manufacturing. From Bill Bonner at acting-man.com:
An Abrupt Drop
Let’s turn back to our regular beat: the U.S. economy and its capital markets. We’ve been warning that the Fed would never make any substantial increase to interest rates. Not willingly, at least.
Groping in the dark, Yellen-style
Each time Fed chief Janet Yellen opens her mouth, out comes a hint that more rate hikes might be coming. But each time, it turns out that the economy is not as robust as she had believed… and that a rate hike isn’t such a good idea after all.
Mainstream economists regularly dismiss worries about falling employment and output in the manufacturing sector.
“Don’t fret about it,” they say. “We have a robust service economy.”
Well, on Tuesday, the news came out that the service economy is not as robust as we thought. Bloomberg:
An abrupt drop in the Institute for Supply Management’s services gauge on Tuesday to a six-year low is the latest in a string of unexpectedly weak data for August.
Besides, the promise of a “service” economy has always been a fraud. We can’t all get rich by mowing each other’s lawns and parking each other’s cars!
You can make money by offering services, but only if there is someone who can pay for them. And you can only pay for services if you are doing something that generates real wealth.
Wealth Drain
Just look at India. It has over half a billion people willing to do just about anything for peanuts. Services? You can get all you want. But that doesn’t make India a wealthy country.
Services are better thought of as a drain on wealth, not a way of building it. Let’s say you want to go out to the movies. Instead of watching your children yourself, you hire a teenager from the neighborhood.
You pay, say, $20 for the evening. This results in an increase to the nation’s service industry income of $20. And you had the benefit of the service. You had $20. Now, someone else has the 20 bucks. Where’s the additional wealth?
Manufacturing, on the other hand, creates wealth. You take $20,000 worth of labor and materials. You put together an automobile and sell it for $25,000. The automobile is worth $5,000 more than what it cost to build it. You are $5,000 richer.
But wait… You will say that someone must be out $5,000. But that isn’t true. He had $25,000 worth of cash. Now, he has $25,000 worth of automobile. He’s even; the world is $5,000 richer.
Crack and Snapchat
Readers will be quick to point out how Silicon Valley has added to the real wealth of the nation with its many services and innovations. Social media companies alone are said to be worth $500 billion – evidence of how much wealth they are bringing to the world.
And it’s true – some are useful for improving productivity. They speed the output of real wealth. But even profitable innovations can destroy wealth as well as create it.
Crack cocaine and television, for example, have probably cost the nation a trillion dollars of real output. Are Facebook and Snapchat much different? As in any other service industry, money passes from one person to another. But is wealth created? Or destroyed?
To continue reading: How is Real Wealth Created?
SLL bets that Trump’s net worth is far closer to $1 billion rather than $10 billion, if he is a billionaire at all. The Donald has always been a king of leverage, as well as boasting, bellicosity, and bombast. Four of his companies have gone bankrupt… so far. America is filled with seemingly wealthy people who fluant their ostensible wealth but hide the other other side of the balance sheet—their debt. Trump is their patron saint. Doug Litowitz, after slogging through Trump’s 92-page financial disclosure submission to the Federal Election Commission, raises the suspicion that much of Trump’s purported fortune is smoke and mirrors. As the debt contraction and deflation tide rolls out, we may see Donald in his birthday suit. If so, he would be emblematic of our age. From Litowitz on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
“Editor’s Note: Alpha Pages contributor Doug Litowitz raises a speculative contrarian position on Donald Trump’s exact worth, based on what was released to the FEC. The bottom line is that no one knows Trump’s net worth, but the speculation usually starts in the billions. Doug Litowitz explores the opposite possibility, namely that Trump is, in relative terms, broke. This is solely his speculation and is not meant as a factual statement but a possibility that has been ignored in the mainstream press.”
I’ve just slogged through all ninety-two pages of Donald Trump’s financial disclosure submission to the Federal Election Commission, and I can’t make heads or tails of it.
I cannot tell how much Trump is worth, if anything. His empire, if he has one, is as mysterious as his haircut, and as impervious as his skyscraper in Chicago – a gigantic phallic mirror named after himself.
In terms of real, lasting assets – is Donald Trump worth roughly $10 billion?
The mainstream press erred horrendously by taking seriously Trump’s disclosure to the FEC, by asking reporters to sit down with the document and try to understand it on its own terms, so to speak. This approach yielded nothing but exhaustion and bewilderment. No one dared speculate that Trump’s purpose in disclosing so much was to disclose so little. It was a 52-Card Pickup, a maze of trees without a forest. The assets – some as small as the single-digit thousands – pile up like obsessive compulsive do-dads in the claustrophobic home of a hoarder. The range of projects goes beyond greed and passes into desperation. High rise buildings and golf courses are one thing, but the list of assets quickly degrades into obscure wineries, Israeli vodka and energy drinks, a mattress and clothing line, television shows, a pension from the screen actors guild, bottled water, book royalties, speaking gigs, and endless inchoate and impossible to value ‘marks’ (i.e. trademarks) and positions in partnerships that have his own name.
This is why the New York Times threw up its hands and proclaimed with cool intrigue that Trump’s income and wealth were “hard to pinpoint.”
The Wall Street Journal punted, saying tautologically that Trump’s disclosures contain disclosures totaling at least $1.5 billion, but conceding that the actual numbers are not known.
Forbes puts his wealth at $4 billion, Bloomberg at $2.9 billion. Trump said recently that he is worth $10 billion and that his wealth has increased by more than $1 billion in the last year due to spiraling real estate prices (this was probably supposed to impress people, but it actually shows a dangerous volatility). The FEC form allows the filing party to value assets and liabilities within a range or at an upper limit, and most of Trump’s assets are vague interests of indeterminate worth and undisclosed indebtedness.
Trump’s illiquid assets and unknown liabilities may or may not offset each other – and he isn’t telling.
What does that leave?
Not much. A relatively small amount of money in a couple of hedge funds, and brokerage portfolios of garden-variety stocks, a couple hundred thousand in gold, and other ho-hum assets consisting almost entirely of his ‘marks.’ He could be worth hundreds of millions, theoretically, but if leveraged, his worth could be negative. Who knows?
To continue reading: Is Trump Really Worth $10 Billion
From Hillary Clinton, who unfortunately needs no introduction:
This one may come to rival you-know-who’s execrable, “You didn’t build that” comment. Ms. Clinton is absolutely right that trickle down economics has not worked. Wealth has increasingly gone to Washington, which is now the richest metropolitan area in the country, and it’s not trickling back down to the people and businesses from whom it was stolen. If business doesn’t create jobs, who does? Government? Her remark about her husband bringing “arithmetic” to Washington is a non sequitur, but we know he brought Arkansas political gangsterism, take-no-prisoners ruthlessness, and a rather relaxed view of the law and his marriage vows to the nation’s capital.
Posted in Business, Government
Tagged Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Idiot quotes, jobs, wealth
