"Wealth Effect" = Widening Wealth Inequality

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Note that widening wealth and income inequality is a non-partisan trend.

One of the core goals of the Federal Reserve"s monetary policies of the past 9 years is to generate the "wealth effect": by pushing the valuations of stocks and bonds higher, American households will feel wealthier, and hence be more willing to borrow and spend, even if they didn"t actually reap any gains by selling stocks and bonds that gained value.

In other words, the mere perception of rising wealth is supposed to trigger a wave of renewed borrowing and spending.

This perception management only worked on the few households which owned enough of these assets to feel wealthier--the top 5%, the top 6 million out of 120 million households. This chart shows what happened as the Fed ceaselessly goosed financial assets higher over the past 9 years: the gains, real and perceived, only flowed to the top 5% of households earning in excess of $200,000 annually.

Spending by the bottom 95% has at best returned to the levels reached a decade ago in 2007.

By focusing on boosting financial assets to the moon as a means of goosing spending, the Federal Reserve has widened wealth and income inequality to the breaking point. Perception management doesn"t actually boost the inflation-adjusted wages of the bottom 95%, which have stagnated for decades. Nor does boosting assets do much good for the vast majority of households which have modest holdings of stocks and bonds, usually in IRA or 401K retirement accounts they can"t touch without paying steep penalties.

As the charts below illustrate, the Grand Canyon between the top 5% and everyone else is widening. Let"s say a househould has $12,000 in retirement funds and $5,000 in a savings account. (Many households have less than $1,000 in savings, so this example-household is doing pretty well to have $17,000 in cash and financial assets.)

Thanks to the Federal Reserve"s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP), savers have lost ground after adjustments for inflation. The stock market has more than doubled, and most bond funds have appreciated, but precious metals and other commodities have not performed as well. So let"s say the household"s retirement portfolio rose by a hefty 75%, or $9,000, to a total of $21,000.

Does this modest gain actually change the financial foundation of the household to the point that the household can now afford to buy a new vehicle, college tuition, etc.? The short answer is no; the gains are simply too modest as a percentage of income to make any difference.

Compare this to a top 5% household with hundreds of thousands of dollars of financial assets: gains registered in the hundreds of thousands do indeed move the needle on household wealth and perception management. The top 5% haven"t just reaped outsized gains in Fed-goosed assets; they"ve also reaped the vast majority of any wage gains generated in the past 9 years of "recovery."

As this chart shows, the bottom 90% lost ground, and the really substantial gains have accrued only to the top 1%.

Note that widening wealth and income inequality is a non-partisan trend. The political and financial elites have feathered their own nests while the bottom 95% have lost ground.

The Federal Reserve"s perverse policy of perception management has exacerbated wealth and income inequality: "wealth effect" = widening wealth inequality.

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The 'Koyaanisqatsi' Economy

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

The film Koyaanisqatsi was released in 1982. The title means ‘life out of balance’ in the language of the Hopi, a Native American tribe who live(d) mainly in what is now north-east Arizona. It is directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. There are no actors, and no dialogue. Philip Glass’s music underlies a series of film fragments that contrast the beauty of American nature with the noise and pollution mankind has added to it. Wikipedia:

The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating “it’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.”

Due to its initial success, Reggio and Glass made two sequels to the film, Powaqqatsi (1988), meaning “parasitic way of life” or “life in transition”, and Naqoyqatsi (2002) which means “life as war”, “civilized violence” and “a life of killing each other”. If you haven’t seen them, they come highly recommended.

Koyaanisqatsi is an fitting term to describe not only our world in general, but also our economies. They are severely out of balance, and getting more so every day. But economies, like nature, need at least a minimum in balance. If that disappears, this lack of balance will tip them over. It is somewhat strange that this is not being recognized, and not even discussed.

It’s as if people think that when almost all wealth goes to a select very few, an economy can still continue to function. It can’t. The rich getting continually richer means the poor getting poorer (as overall growth is slow or non-existent), until the latter reach a point where they can no longer afford even basic necessities. That’s when parts of an economy will start dying, in the same vein that parts of a living body, an organism, die off when the supply of blood, nutrients and oxygen is cut off.

For an economy to function, it needs money to flow through it the same way a body needs blood to flow. If all the money gets increasingly concentrated in just a small area, the economy stagnates. We measure the flow of money as velocity:

If that graph would describe a human body, it would be in an ambulance on the way to ER. The only times velocity of money have been as low as today was during a Great Depression and a World War.

The ever richer rich cannot spend enough to keep things moving. They can buy stocks and bonds and houses, but they can’t buy all the groceries and clothing that the poor and middle class no longer can. But it’s those things that keep the economy humming along.

An economy as unbalanced as the one we presently have is bound to perish. The rich are killing their own economies by trying to get richer all the time. And they have no idea that’s what happens. It’s sort of baked into their understanding of what capitalism is. Or neo-liberalism if you want.

We should look upon, and handle, our economies and societies as living, and vibrant, systems, but we’re miles away from any such understanding. Our education systems are gross failures when it comes to this, and our media, owned by the rich, support anything that will make them richer. Even though that is suicidal for everyone involved. We are a tragic species in many more ways than one.

This has nothing to do with political views, with socialism or communism or any ism, it’s a simple empirical observation. It’s not about ‘everyone deserves their fair share’, but about if they don’t get their share, no economy will be left to hand out any shares even to the rich. If the rich want to get richer, they will need a functioning economy to get there.

In other words, someone will have to call a halt, or at least a pause, to the pace at which they’re getting richer, or their quest for riches will become self-defeating. Literally every single human being can grasp this, but hardly anyone even considers it. At their peril.

Here’s just a small example from CNBC, there are thousands just like it:

The Top 1% Of Americans Now Control 38% Of The Wealth

America’s top 1% now control 38.6% of the nation’s wealth, a historic high, according to a new Federal Reserve Report. The Federal Reserve’s Surveys of Consumer Finance shows that Americans throughout the income and wealth ladder posted gains between 2013 and 2016. But the wealthy gained the most, driven largely by gains in the stock market and asset values. The top 1% saw their share of wealth rise to 38.6% in 2016 from 36.3% in 2013.

The next highest 9% of families fell slightly, and the share of wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans has been falling steadily for 25 years, hitting 22.8% in 2016 from 33.2% in 1989. The top income earners also saw the biggest gains. The top 1% saw their share of income rise to a new high of 23.8% from 20.3% in 2013. The income shares of the bottom 90% fell to 49.7% in 2016.

Now, you may think: 38%, how bad is that?, and you may be forgiven for thinking that way. After all, you’re in a majority there. To understand the severity of what’s happening, you need to look at the trends:

This one from the New York Times, annotated by Charles Hugh Smith, is very revealing too. What happens is that just as we find ourselves in a stagnating/shrinking economy, the rich get richer fast. They can do that because central banks are releasing trillions of dollars in QE, but also because the system is geared towards eviscerating the poor, and increasingly the middle class as well:

And this is amplified by the ultra-low rates policies central banks have been pushing over the past decade. They allow for the ever poorer to keep up appearances of wealth by plunging into debt ever deeper, but they don’t allow for their living conditions, their jobs, their savings, their pensions, to recover. They do the exact opposite. As this graph from Mike Lebowitz, one of many to show the same trendline, goes to show:

This is not an American phenomenon, though it’s more pronounced stateside. And Trump’s tax reform plans promise to only make it worse. It looks like Bernie Sanders might be the only politician in the US to stop it, but what are the odds of that? We live in a system that is warranting economic suicide for everyone including its own proponents, and we’re blindly following it like so many lemmings.

The Koyaanisqatsi film doesn’t have a happy Hollywood ending, and it makes no pretense of it. Our Koyaanisqatsi economy will not end with ‘they lived happily ever after’ either. The protagonists wouldn’t know how to achieve that. They don’t understand what makes an economy run, and keeps it running.

And they don’t want to understand, because they think it’ll make them less rich. Nobody gives balance a second’s thought. Presumably because they think the system, like nature, will eventually balance itself. And they’re right in that. They just haven’t considered what that balancing act might mean for them personally.

if you’re rich, good on you. But don’t forget what made it possible for you to gather your riches, or you’ll lose them, and probably a lot more too.

Visualizing The Collapse Of The Middle Class In 20 Major U.S. Cities

When future historians look back at the beginning of the 21st century, they’ll note that we grappled with many big issues. They’ll write about the battle between nationalism and globalism, soaring global debt, a dysfunctional healthcare system, societal concerns around automation and AI, and pushback on immigration. They will also note the growing number of populist leaders in Western democracies, ranging from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump.

However, as Visual Cpitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, these historians will not view these ideas and events in isolation. Instead, they will link them all, at least partially, to an overarching trend that is intimately connected to today’s biggest problems: the “hollowing out” of the middle class.

VISUALIZING THE COLLAPSE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

The fact is many people have less money in their pockets – and understandably, this has motivated people to take action against the status quo.

And while the collapse of the middle class and income inequality are issues that receive a fair share of discussion, we thought that this particular animation from Metrocosm helped to put things in perspective.

The following animation shows the change in income distribution in 20 major U.S. cities between 1970 and 2015:

The differences between 1970 and 2015 are intense. At first, each distribution is more bell-shaped, with the majority of people in a middle income bracket – and by 2015, those people are “pushed” out towards the extremes as they either get richer or poorer.

A BROADER LOOK AT INCOME INEQUALITY

This phenomenon is not limited to major cities, either.

Here’s another look at the change in income distribution using smaller brackets and the whole U.S. adult population:

It’s a multi-faceted challenge, because while a significant portion of middle class households are being shifted into lower income territory, there are also many households that are doing the opposite. According to Pew Research, the percentage of households in the upper income bracket has grown from 14% to 21% between 1971 and 2015.

The end result? With people being pushed to both ends of the spectrum, the middle class has decreased considerably in size. In 1971, the middle class made up 61% of the adult population, and by 2014 it accounted for less than 50%.

As this “core” of society shrinks, it aggravates the aforementioned problems. People and governments borrow more money to make up for a lack of middle class wealth, while backlashes against globalism, free trade, and open borders are fueled. The populists who can “fix” the broken system are elected, and so on.

Just How Crowded Is The "Long Dollar" Trade? The Answer In One Chart

Until last night"s Trump statement that the US dollar is overvalued, it was smooth sailing for Wall Street"s momentum chasers, who happily piled into what until recently was Wall Street"s most crowded trade. How crowded?

For the latest answer, we go to the latest just released monthly Fund Managers Survey conducted by BofA"s Michael Hartnett who shows that according to Wall Streeters themselves, the dollar is the most crowded trade by orders of magnitude. In fact, in January the number of respondents who said the "Long USD" is the most crowded trade has risen from 35% in December to a whopping 47%, the highest response rate in the last few years of the survey. Far behind, in second and third place, are "short government bonds" and "long high quality/minimum vol" both at 11%.

What makes this observation paradoxical is how reflexive it is, because in the same report BofA writes that contrarians note "long US dollar seen as most crowded trade by a country mile", and adds that the percentage of investors who think USD is overvalued is the highest in over a decade, or since Nov’06 (net 22%).

Still, they refuse to sell... until now. Because now that the president-elect has publicly taken the other side of the trade, we urge readers to take a second look at RCB"s warning that the "Pain Trade", i.e. the inversion of Long-USD positions, has begun.