Quick! call a whambulance: Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall

[and-justice-for-all]

(the Yahoo! front page title: "Super-rich are getting poorer")

by David Leonhardt and Geraldine Fabrikant
Friday, August 21, 2009

provided by
The New York Times.

The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent.

They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality.

But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.

For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.

The relative struggles of the rich may elicit little sympathy from less well-off families who are dealing with the effects of the worst recession in a generation. But the change does raise several broader economic questions. Among them is whether harder times for the rich will ultimately benefit the middle class and the poor, given that the huge recent increase in top incomes coincided with slow income growth for almost every other group. In blunter terms, the question is whether the better metaphor for the economy is a rising tide that can lift all boats — or a zero-sum game.

More: http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/107575/rise-of-the-super-rich-hits-a-sobering-wall.html

[Thucydides]

1. Business 101, which the wealthy have forgotten or never learned.....

Eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns. We have reached that point!

This is good news, now they need to take some advice from another well known capitalist named Henry Ford.

'Our own sales depend in a measure upon the wages we pay,' he said. ... 'If we can distribute high wages, then that money is going to be spent, and it will serve to make storekeepers and distributors and manufacturers and workers in other lines more prosperous, and their prosperity will be reflected in our sales. ...

Basically there is no one left to buy products from them, except themselves and that just ain't sustainable now is it.



:think: