When asked how much money per year would be necessary for them to consider themselves "rich," 53 percent mentioned an income of $150,000 or less, and 71 percent said an income of $300,000 would be enough. Wealth marketing HNW Inc. considers an income of more than $350,000 per year enough to push someone into the one percent. But they also say most one percenters aren't aware of their exceptional status.
According to this article in New York, Wall Street is bleeding badly these days. Profits are down and much of the credit goes to Dodd-Frank. Midway through the article, one can read the following succinct description of how Wall Street made its money in times past, and then what went wrong:
To understand how radically Wall Street is changing, you have to first understand how modern Wall Street made its money. In the quaint old days, Wall Street tended to earn its profits rather boringly by loaning money, advising mergers, and supervising bond issues and IPOs. The leveraging of the American economy—and the supercharging of the financial industry—began in earnest in the early eighties. And banks have profited from a successive series of financial bubbles, each bigger and more violent than the one preceding it. “Wall Street did a really good job convincing people it was really complicated and they were the only ones who could do it and it justified paying them millions of dollars,” a former Lehman trader explained. Credit was the engine that powered the explosion in bank profits. From junk bonds in the eighties to the emerging-markets crisis in the nineties to the subprime mania of the aughts, Wall Street developed new ways to produce, package, and sell debt to willing investors. The alphabet soup of complex vehicles that defined the 2008 crash—CLO, CDO, CDS—had all been developed to sell more credit. “If you look at the past 25 years, the world economy was going through a process of leveraging,” a senior Citigroup executive said. “Debt has grown faster than economic growth. The banking industry was at the epicenter of facilitating the growth of credit creation. It drove every business.” . . . From 1986 to the middle of the last decade, Wall Street’s earnings grew from 19 percent of all U.S. corporate profits to 41 percent. And the talent followed. . . . Bank earnings and ever-rising asset values allowed them to borrow ever-larger amounts of money, which in turn juiced ever-greater profits. Banks, which had previously made their money advising corporations and underwriting securities, essentially became giant hedge funds (in 2007, Morgan Stanley held $1.05 trillion in assets supported by just $30 billion in equity).
The article concludes that Wall Street will never again see the good old days:
The implosion of the credit bubble destroyed Wall Street’s business model. Now regulations are kicking in that will sap its ability to create the next bubble. Over the past year and a half, the banks have dramatically deconstructed their proprietary-trading desks to comply with the new rules of the game. Among Volcker’s provisions is a rule that mandates that banks can invest just 3 percent of their core capital in hedge funds and private equity, meaning that, in addition to being banned from trading for their own accounts, they can’t take risks in outside funds either. “There’s less money to go around because the revenue business model is changing, and it has to change,” a former Lehman trader says. “You can’t print the cheap money anymore.”
The loss-numbers cited by the article are dramatic, but I'm not buying that Wall Street has so quickly been tamed and reformed. Time will tell whether the trends described in this article are long-term, given that Wall Street has long had a choke-hold on Congress, and can be expected to work vigorously to find new ways of making obscene money while returning little to nothing of value.
With the help of a DI reader who wishes to remain anonymous, I have created the following Declaration for modern Americans to wake up from their delusions. I'd recommend that all adults and school children put their hands over their hearts in the morning and say the following instead of pledging allegiance to the powers-that-be (but see here for an alternate form of the Pledge).
In this TED video, researcher Richard Wilkinson discusses real work data based levels of income disparity one finds in "rich developed-market democracies." As you can see (at 4:11 of the video), nations with low amounts of GNP don't tend to exhibit aberrant levels of health and social problems. On the other hand, countries that exhibit substantial amount of income disparity (3:44) exhibit high levels of health and social problems.
GNP per capita is thus a poor measure of a country's well-being. Further, we should be alarmed at high levels of income disparity. The same relationship (5:01) is apparent when one compares GNP to the UNICEF scale of child well-being. "The national well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth." The same tests were run on the 50 states of the U.S. with the same results.
What else suffers along with high income disparity? Trust (5:45), involvement in community life (6:00), mental illness (6:50), violence, percentage of the population in prison (7:40), the percentage of dropouts in high school (8:16), social mobility (poor parents having children who end up poor) (8:24), drug abuse, life expectancy, obesity, math and literacy scores and many other problems (9:10).
Wilkinson sums it up by saying that the countries that do worse---those that have higher social dysfunction--tend to be more economically unequal.
How do the various low income disparity nations and states attain their earning levels? Sweden does it by heavily taxing the rich. Japan has more comparable wages to begin with. Wilkinson's numbers show, however, that it doesn't much matter how you get your equality as long as you get there somehow. He adds that it's not only the poor that are affected by income disparity (12:20). Additional statistics show that the wealthy significantly benefit from general equality, not just the poor.
What is the proximate mechanism for all of these startling numbers. Wilkinson points to the following consequences of inequality:
More superiority and inferiority;
More status competition and consumerism;
More status insecurity;
More worry about how we are seen and judged;
More "social evaluation anxiety" (threats to self-esteem & social status, fear of negative judgments).
Wilkinson offers an unsurprising solution to countries and states with high levels of social dysfunction: Even out the income, either by offering more opportunities to folks at the lower end of the scale or by taxing the high earners (16:17). The bottom line is that we can improve a country's overall well-being by reducing economic inequality.
I am not at all surprised by Wilkinson's findings. It combines many ideas that I've previously discussed. No, GNP (and GDP) is a terrible measure of well-being (and see here) and people are deeply compelled to display their self-worth through material acquisitions. And all of this would seem to be exacerbated to the extent that TV and magazines pump images of the haves (and their expensive toys) into the homes and lives of the have-nots, causing all kinds of frustrations and degradations of self-worth among the have-nots. That was my suspicion prior to viewing Wilkinson's video and now all of this and many other measures of social dysfunction are backed up by Wilkinson's real-life numbers.
Hello, I invite you to subscribe to Dangerous Intersection by entering your email below. You will have the option to receive emails notifying you of new posts once per week or more often.
