Of Two Minds
By Charles Hugh Smith
November 17, 2021
Given that political power in America is a pay-to-play auction in which the highest bidder wins, how this incomprehensibly lopsided ownership of wealth plays out is an open question.
Wealth inequality easily falls into an abstraction unless we contextualize it in meaningful ways. I’ve annotated two St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED) charts–the net worth of America’s top 1% and the net worth of America’s bottom 50% of households, roughly 66 million households–to show their net worth and their share of all household net worth, and put this in the context of inflation and GDP (gross domestic product) of the U.S. and other nations.