patrick.net

Thats just how this nation goes. Have you seen that show "Secret Millionaire" which I guess is popular since it is still on television lately? It's an utter mockery of the poor, yet people somehow enjoy that crap.

I thought about this a while, and think that the Billionaire Club has a high percentage of a particular kind of person.

Very good at playing the "team" card for public consumption, but it's utterly all about them in their internal world. I suppose megalomaniac is a good word? In any case like Golem they have their Precious (their fortune) and it MUST expand without limits. Thus the "victim" mentality, they are surrounded by MORONS who don't understand what geniuses they are. Anyone who has the power they want for themselves, or even stands to question them, must be part of the Forces of Evil persecuting their righteous cause.

Thus expecting them to "share the pain" is gibberish to them. A downturn is an opportunity to increase wealth, not employment. When is enough enough? Never. Wealth is of course all about wielding power, and who is the best person to hold the reins that matter?

This guy, with fewer redeeming moments:

So, lets put a few facts into the discussion. The Huffington Post talks about 'record profits' and doesn't mention the fact that the Fed has increased the money supply from $800 Billion in 2009 to $2.5 TRILLION today out of thin air, effectively decreasing the value of each dollar in existence to 1/3 of its previous value. This represents a massively higher expansion of the money supply than ever before in American history by any metric. In this environment profit numbers are marginally and NOMINALLY higher though representing an actual vast decrease in value because of all the dilution of value of each dollar. Its not necessarily a surprise that the average blog participant doesn't understand how their personal fortunes are being deleted by Fed actions, but one would hope that someone who calls himself a journalist would have more than a cursory grasp of what is being done to wealth in this country and around he world. There was more comprehension of dynamic economics in my high school than is represented in the average blog post, this one included.

jack,

Not sure how useful it is to consider that they are "only" being handed devalued dollars. A 1/3 devaluation seems askew to me, if it were that large in "real money" it would have knock-on effect on actual inflation, which so far has not been the case. Let's say I accept that argument though. By any useful measure, corporations are richer than ever. They sit on piles of cash but are not spending on wages or capital improvements to processes. Instead they use it for mergers and acquisitions to expand their empires, for offshoring, for just about anything else. I like the profit motive, however CLEARLY here there is tons of money which is not "trickling down" in any sense and the wealth gap expands.

Dollars are only a small part of the wealth of billionaires. Most of their wealth is stock (corporations) and prime land.

Billionaires actually benefit from inflation more than they lose from it, because the nominal prices of stock and land rise with inflation, protecting their share. It's the elderly with CDs who lose when the Fed dilutes the dollar. And the Chinese, who own US Treasuries. So the billionaires end up with a larger fraction of the pie.

The money is actually trickling upward, from the rest of us to the very rich.

nominal prices of stock and land rise with inflation

Seems like they just don't lose on this, rather than gain. These assets would just hold their intrinsic value(not talking about price), except to the extent they are bid higher as an inflation hedge.

But because they have so many assets, they can leverage them when they sniff inflation coming. Thats how they can easily hedge the value they will lose on their so called "Cash" investments.

Vincente, not only does it have a 'knock on effect' in actual inflation, the growth in the supply of money is a primary definition of 'inflation'. Price inflation, though very attention getting and impactful on the day to day lives of the average person at the outset, is NOT the heart of inflation that is so destructive to economies.

Our current inflation rate is over 9% the way inflation was gauged 20-30 years ago before the government became so creative in masking the nominal effects of their policies. The corporations ARE sitting on piles of cash, inflated cash that they can't afford to allow to let go because the interest rates are artificially held so low that no reasonable business would lend at those unprofitable rates. The wealth of corporations can be partially explained by the illusury aspect of how rich the companies are in stock when the Dow, for example, is no higher now than it was BEFORE all this funny money was printed baselessly into existence. Triple the dollars in existence, whether it has matriculated through the economy fully or not, means by definition the assets held must sell for three times as much to represent an equal share of value as it did before the creation of the currency. We are in a timeframe very much like Bernie Madoff held his ponzi scheme in high esteem prior to more money going out than coming in. When the piper demands his pay, he jig will be up and the single-layer thought processes that make a corporation APPEAR richer because they have three times as much money that has been, in fact, devalued by TWO thirds, NOT 1/3.

Patrick, I've read your comment no less than half a dozen times, and nothing in your post has any concrete basis in fact. Dollars are by no definition 'only a small part of the wealth of billionaires'. Dollars might not compensate for their health. Dollars might not replace their lifelong relationships with their families. But dollars represent the vast majority of billionaires' wealth until the time that another reserve currency replaces the dollar. Hard assets such as land, gold and other precious metals, and paper securities, particularly, are accumulated and denominated in dollars. When dollars are devalued, the land doesn't shrink, but it eventually becomes worth more dollars, which is how they became billionaires in the first place. I assure you we wouldn't have any billionaires in 1900 dollars. There are some benefits to billionaires, but they are, in the aggregate, overwhelmingly dwarfed by the disadvantages of inflation to those same billionaires. Nominal prices rising never keeps up with the inflation of the money supply which makes the paper wealth never materialize and destroys so much wealth across the entire economy as to undermine the markets that the billionaire would rely upon in order to get the assessed value or exploit the potential value of any asset as he would with a rock solid definition of the value of a dollar that could not be cheated by devaluation via the printing press. When the handful of billionaires acquire assets so imbalanced that the public finds it untenable, then, the polling place becomes his enemy.

I assure you we wouldn’t have any billionaires in 1900 dollars

Bill Gates, Buffett, Ellison, and one of the Walmart heirs have over $1B in 1900 money.

When the handful of billionaires acquire assets so imbalanced that the public finds it untenable, then, the polling place becomes his enemy.

but yeah, this is obvious. Billionaires have been funding their ideological defenses for their wealth since the Powell Memo.

"The most powerful members of this group were Joseph Coors in Denver, Richard Mellon Scaife in Pittsburgh, John Olin in New York City, David and Charles Koch in Wichita, the Smith Richardson family in North Carolina, and Harry Bradley in Milwaukee - all of whom agreed to finance a number of right-wing think tanks, which over the past thirty years have come to include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

"This formidable alliance of far-right-wing foundations deployed their resources in building and strategically linking "an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and concerned citizens groups both within and outside of the academy.... A small sampling of these entities includes the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, [the] Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, as well as [David] Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture."

http://www.truth-out.org/100109A

It's all becoming a joke now. Hence my sig:

jackrusse1l says

Our current inflation rate is over 9% the way inflation was gauged 20-30 years ago before the government became so creative in masking the nominal effects of their policies. The corporations ARE sitting on piles of cash, inflated cash that they can’t afford to allow to let go because the interest rates are artificially held so low that no reasonable business would lend at those unprofitable rates.

Oh, no, not another Shadowstats groupie! If inflation has been at around 8.5% for the last 11 years like Mr. Williams would have you believe, then prices would be about 2.5 times as much as they were in 2000.

Do I even need to argue with you that prices are not 2.5X as much as they were in 2000? You have to do some serious cherry picking to get that kind of inflation in anything.

Also, the "cash" that corporations are sitting on is money that they ARE lending and accepting little interest for. What's the alternative to lending at low interest, and keeping physical cash in a vault anyway? Zero interest, and a security risk.

I don't think inflation helps the rich. It hinders them, and forces them to keep their money investing and re-investing or to lose it. If a family just put their money under their mattresses for 50 years, they would be broke.

Most ultra wealthy aim to maintain, not lose. If land following inflation then they're holding and maintaining their wealth.

Investing in stocks when you've got billions isn't easy. You can't simply say "wow! bp oil spill this thing is tanking, SELL IT ALL!" Look at Warren Buffet, back when coke was $90/share he said it was worth $40ish something per share. He said he wasn't selling because he couldn't get out, or back in making a profit. So he held it as it corrected. His type of money is hard to move in or out of the market without controlling the market.

Steady inflation/deflation is good for banks, the key being steady. It means they can calculate out 30 year mortgages without having to worry about 3-4 high inflation years destroying their profits, and destroying their companies. Hence why the fed keeps inflation steady.

Troy, your point is precisely correct, mine was a sloppy generalization. In 1900 dollars there would be enough billionaires to fill a Volkswagen.

MarkinSF, I'm not a groupie for anyone. Its plain to see how the concept of 'inflation' eludes you. You make it plain in your post. Inflation isn't defined solely as how much prices have increased. In fact, some of the most important prices HAVE increased well over double since the year 2000.

In 2000 it would have taken me four ounces of gold to purchase a decent big screen television. Today I can purchase a unit that has much higher technology for less than one ounce. In 2000 a gallon of gasoline was between $1.60-$1.80 where I live here in Texas. Now its $3.49. That represents approximately a 100% increase, but I'm sure that will stabilize out lower within the next few months with all the influx of baseless dollars into the international pool. And that does qualify as some serious cherry picking. But, I’m not asserting that prices have absorbed all the inflation.

Now, you explain what the effect of taking the money supply from $800 Billion to $2.5 Trillion in 2 ½ years has done to the purchasing power of every dollar you have saved or that you now earn. The fact that that money didn’t make it into your paycheck doesn’t mean the effects of it aren’t in the pipeline headed for the cash register at a store near you.

jackrusse1l says

doesn’t mention the fact that the Fed has increased the money supply from $800 Billion in 2009 to $2.5 TRILLION today out of thin air

I thought this "new money" was an offset to the "new money" that disappeared in real estate, no? No one talks about the bubble creating wealth out of "thin air" but somehow when the fed does the same thing we are supposed to go to walmart and buy chinese pitchforks for the new revolution.

jackrusse1l says

Now, you explain what the effect of taking the money supply from $800 Billion to $2.5 Trillion in 2 ½ years

Thing is, this money (whether it's $2.5T or not is a debate I don't want to get into) hasn't hit the middle class so it's not going to result in price inflation or "inflation expectations".

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2V

pipeline headed for the cash register at a store near you.

Prices go up. People buy less. Hello more jobs lost and more deflation. There can be no price inflation without wage inflation.

How much money billionaires have doesn't really matter to J6P.

My favorite Koch quote:

Ask Charles Koch what he thinks about Obama and he looks like he’s just bit into a lemon. "He's a dedicated egalitarian," Charles said. "I'm not saying he's a Marxist, but he's internalized some Marxist models -- that is, that business tends to be successful by exploiting its customers and workers."

It's funny to see how "egalitarian" can become almost another curse word like "socialist" for these people. It means "equal", so he doesn't believe all men are created equal.

Vicente, you surely don't believe that 'egalitarian' means 'created equal'. The most common usage of egalitarian is embodied in wikipedia's definition of an 'egalitarian community':

Egalitarian communities are groups of people who have chosen to live together, with egalitarianism as one of their core values. A broad definition of egalitarianism is "equal access to resources and to decision-making power." For example, decision-making is done by consensus or another system in which each person has a voice; it is not done hierarchically with only one or a few people making choices that will affect the whole group. If the group shares assets (income, vehicles, etc.), they are distributed equitably throughout the group, and each member has access to more-or-less the same resources as any other member. Egalitarian communities are a type of commune (some communal groups are not egalitarian in nature).

An egalitarian believes that equality reflects the natural state of humanity.

Egalitarianism is the opposite of elitism.

An egalitarian system seeks "equal pay for equal work". A strictly egalitarian system also seeks to remove class and social barriers in the way people live and work.

It's quite clear where the Kochs stand on equality.

The Kochs are parasitic sociopathic narcissists bent on destroying the common American so they can have it all. They're disgusting pigs.

Its interesting how Vicente can elude to such an objective opinion and make it sound so much less sophomoric than simchaland and communicate virtually the same thing.