Let me begin by apologizing for a US-centric statistical
framework. I'm
keenly aware that my Grokolleagues come from
around the globe!
No doubt
$300 billion is a big number as amounts of wealth
go, slightly less than
the recent annual revenues of
Exxon/Mobil, on which they report Wall Street
earnings in
the neighborhood of $20-30 billion annually.
But surely
such amounts of "intellectual property" wealth,
however loosely fact checked,
are not the largest in
history. TARP, even as reduced by Congress, distributed
more than $400 billion to corporations and banks (foreign
and domestic)
from the US Treasury, and although much of
this is said to be
repaid, in reality the
Federal Reserve's "quantitative easing"
program
continues to make $40 billion per month in new
capital
available to investment bankers, largely fueling mergers and acquisitions
and stock
market growth in the absence of jobs and other economic
activity.
The Pew Research Council
reports that the Great Recession (2007-2009)
all but
wiped out wealth gains by the middle class going back three
decades,
while in excess of 90% of recovery in wealth has
gone to the top 1%. That's
what I'd call wealth transfer,
and the magnitude of losses and gains is in the
trillions, roughly the size of one year's
GDP.
---
Rosser's
trick: "For every proof of me, there is a shorter proof of my negation". [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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