Richard Wolff | How THE RICH Stole Democracy
BIDENOMICS: WHAT THEY CONSPRISE TO CONCEAL FROM MIDDLE AMERICA
Chris Hedges | Forces that DESTROY Us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoqmwCo2bQA
Federal Trade Report: Globalization Cripples American Towns as Free Trade Moves Jobs Overseas, Crushes Wages
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American grads, undermine labor rights, and even get many progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities. NEIL MUNRO
Report: Household Wealth Plummeted by $13.5 Trillion This Year
American households' real wealth fell $13.5 trillion in the first three quarters of 2022, according to a MarketWatch report.
The 8.6 percent drop from January to September is the second fastest decline on record, behind the financial crisis of 2008/2009. Record-high inflation under the Biden administration is causing a decrease in the purchasing power of assets and liabilities, MarketWatch reports:
Nominal net worth fell 4.6% to $143.3 trillion, as the market value of assets fell by $6 trillion and liabilities rose by about $900 billion. Households’ balance sheets—assets minus liabilities—were propped up by a 10% increase in home equity, which is the greatest source of wealth for most American families.
But the loss in real wealth from January through September was about twice as large as the nominal loss—$13.5 trillion in current dollars—after accounting for the rapid inflation experienced this year. Inflation makes both debts and liabilities worth less in terms of purchasing power.
Real household wealth, after adjusting for inflation, was 10 percent higher than it was in late 2019.
The price of stocks, which have lost about 25 percent of their value, outpaced gains in real estate values in the third quarter, a financial report released Friday by the Federal Reserve showed. The Federal Reserve's report put the nominal wealth loss at $6.8 trillion.
Published under: Economy, Federal Reserve, Inflation
nd they said it could never happen in America!
This Is The NEW Homeless Capital Of California
Jesse Watters Primetime
BANKSTERS: GLOBAL PARASITES
Banksters: The Untouchable Bank (Global Finance Scandal Documentary) | Real Stories
Tucker Carlson: Biden should be impeached for this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_yRBwxn-RA
(They really have absolutely no idea how many illegals are in the country as the Democrat Party, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, La Raza/ UnidoUS, Mexico and the Catholic Church thwart any effort to count them
The suggestion comes as the U.S. population
has increased to the highest total in history,
hitting 331,893,745 residents in 2021,
driven mostly by legal immigration. For
comparison, the population in 1970 stood
at 203 million residents.
The Rise of the Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else | ENDEVR Documentary
Every year, the federal government rewards about 1.2 million foreign nationals with green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. while another 1.4 million foreign nationals secure various temporary work visas to take American jobs.
This massive legal immigration inflow, opposed by the majority of Republican voters, is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who are added to the U.S. population annually.
Tucker Carlson: The real criminals are getting richer
Richard D. Wolff | Why Capitalism Must Be DESTROYED
Growing Economy, Miserable Citizens: Why Are Rich Countries So Unhappy? | ENDEVR Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QldruYg8rGs
The Divide: Growing Economy, Miserable Citizens | Why Are Rich Countries So Unhappy? | ENDEVR Documentary The Divide tells the story of 7 individuals striving for a better life in the modern day US and UK - where the top 0.1% owns as much wealth as the bottom 90%. By plotting these tales together, we uncover how virtually every aspect of our lives is controlled by one factor: the size of the gap between rich and poor.
Tucker Carlson: The real criminals are getting richer
Richard D. Wolff | Why Capitalism Must Be DESTROYED
Growing Economy, Miserable Citizens: Why Are Rich Countries So Unhappy? | ENDEVR Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QldruYg8rGs
The Divide: Growing Economy, Miserable Citizens | Why Are Rich Countries So Unhappy? | ENDEVR Documentary The Divide tells the story of 7 individuals striving for a better life in the modern day US and UK - where the top 0.1% owns as much wealth as the bottom 90%. By plotting these tales together, we uncover how virtually every aspect of our lives is controlled by one factor: the size of the gap between rich and poor.
Yellen Predicts ‘Much Lower Inflation’ in 2023. She’s Usually Wrong.
'I don’t think we’re about to lose control of inflation,' Yellen said last year, before US lost control of inflation
Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday that she expects "much lower inflation" within the next year. But the Cabinet appointee has been consistently—and baselessly—optimistic about inflation since she joined the Biden administration.
"I believe by the end of next year you will see much lower inflation, if there's not an unanticipated shock," Yellen said in a Sunday appearance on 60 Minutes. The secretary cited reductions in shipping costs and delivery lags as evidence that high prices will soon be in the rearview.
Yellen made virtually the same prediction last year, when inflation was at a troubling 5.4 percent. "I don’t think we’re about to lose control of inflation," Yellen said in October 2021, suggesting the resolution of supply chain issues would tame inflation within a year. By June 2022, however, inflation had surged to a 40-year high of 9.1 percent.
In May 2021, less than two months after Congress passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, Yellen predicted there wasn't "going to be an inflationary problem" at all because President Joe Biden's spending plans were "relatively small relative to the size of the economy," an argument that put her in lockstep with White House officials. Economists, however, have concluded that the American Rescue Plan significantly contributed to inflation.
Yellen offered a mea culpa for her inaccurate predictions in June, admitting she "was wrong … about the path that inflation would take."
Biden was similarly unsuccessful in accurately predicting inflation rates. The president in July 2021 declared that "no serious economist" is "suggesting there's unchecked inflation on the way."
Coming to America
Imagine that you are a U.S. immigration officer, handing out green cards to the would-be Americans of the world. You have before you two applicants who look almost completely the same; for some arcane, unspecified bureaucratic reason, you can only approve one of them. They’re both well-educated by American standards, both bringing identical families, both passed their background checks.
The major difference is their nation of origin. One is from a nation with a strong tradition of rule of law, free markets, and democratic pluralism. The other is from a country where kleptocracy, autocracy, and socialism are standard. The difference, in other words, is the character of the society that your two would-be immigrants come from. The question is: Should this difference matter?
The basic argument of The Culture Transplant, the new book from George Mason University professor Garett Jones, is that at least in the aggregate, the answer to this question is "yes." The marginal immigrant, to be sure, may not matter. But Jones shows, through an engaging and digestible tour of the academic literature, that people bring their national character with them when they migrate; that those values persist for up to several generations; and that some values really are better for societal flourishing than others, so the values immigrants bring matters a great deal.
To reach this conclusion, Jones relies on a fairly diverse set of evidence. Much of the basis for his argument, though, is drawn from the so-called deep-roots literature. That research, in essence, looks at what today’s countries were like 500 to 2,500 years ago, in terms of level of governance, agricultural development, and technological development. It observes that what a country was like hundreds of years ago is a strong predictor of how developed it is today. More to Jones’s point, it observes that what a country’s people were like hundreds of years ago predicts what they are like today.
The point here is that, for whatever reason, certain fundamental facts about a civilization—i.e., its level of development—are both highly relevant to its performance on the centuries timespan and transplantable from one place to another. One plausible explanation is that whatever determines this outcome inheres in the people from those civilizations, who carry it with them and "transplant" it wherever they migrate.
Indeed, Jones reviews extensive research that shows immigrants often look more like their ancestors than the countries they arrive to, even several generations after arrival. If your ancestors believed in things conducive to development—social trust, cooperation, fairness, etc.—then you probably do too. And those beliefs matter for how the country you now live in does.
What are the concrete implications of this view? Jones offers two. One is that the countries with the highest rates of innovation—China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States—should be extremely cautious about changing the population composition through migration. These countries produce the overwhelming majority of the world’s progress, and if progress is a function of your country’s composition, then we should care a lot about keeping their current mix, because otherwise all of humanity loses out.
The other implication Jones offers is that most developing nations should be open to migration from these countries, specifically from China. He notes that most of the nations dominated by migrants from China—Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, for example—do quite well by most measures of thriving. The norms of Chinese civilization, interrupted though they were by Mao’s terror, are he thinks still a good way to get ahead. So the millions of Chinese migrants to Africa are probably a boon.
This last argument I find less persuasive—it seems likely that Chinese migrants to African nations represent a deliberate expansion of the Chinese sphere of influence, a neocolonial project with dire global security implications. But bracketing such concerns, the basic value of The Culture Transplant is that it gives a firm research foundation to an obvious, but infrequently acknowledged fact: different migrants are different.
George Borjas, the Harvard economist who is probably the nation’s leading academic proponent of immigration restrictionism, entitled his 2016 book on immigration economics We Wanted Workers, itself an allusion to a line from the Swiss playwright Max Frisch: "we wanted workers, but we got people instead." Borjas’s point is, in part, that much of contemporary immigration policy is structured around considering the labor market implications of additional arrivals, without considering them as whole persons. More generally, it might be fair to say that the U.S. immigration system allocates the right to immigrate on the basis of skill, family connections, humanitarian concern, or underrepresentation of national background. We want workers, or family members, or refugees. But we get people instead.
Those people, moreover, carry with them notions—about fairness, justice, trust, good and bad governance—that, Jones shows, are durable. They shape the culture that they come to. And so it is perfectly reasonable, from the perspective of someone who thinks, as most Americans do, that America should select those immigrants who serve its national interest, to also believe that the values immigrants bring with them matter and should be considered.
It is hard, of course, to do that under the status quo—nobody gets a visa because he loves America. But if Jones is right, it matters that green cards go to those who do love America, and so it would be good to spend more time discerning how to measure that correctly.
The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left
by Garett Jones
Stanford Business Books, 228 pp., $25
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal.
2022 global art market benefits from
an “explosion of wealth” at the top
In the past two years, a global pandemic has officially cost more than six million lives (with estimates indicating that some 20 million people have actually perished due to COVID-19). The US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has killed at least 200,000 military personnel and 14,000 civilians, while displacing eight million more. Surging inflation threatens vast numbers with fuel and food insecurity, and starvation in certain parts of the world, in the coming winter months.
Yet the world’s art market has never been in healthier shape, according to A Survey of Global Collecting in 2022, a recently issued Art Basel & UBS Report.
After a brief interruption in 2020, the art market “bounced back strongly in 2021, with aggregate sales of art and antiques by dealers and auction houses reaching an estimated $65.1 billion. Representing a 29% increase on the previous year, this figure outstrips the market’s 2019 value by $0.7 billion.”
The “robust” character of the art market mirrors the stratospheric rise in the wealth of the world’s richest people over the same period. According to Credit Suisse, “The ranks of the global ‘ultra-high net worth’ (UHNW) individuals, those who have $30 million or more in assets not including their primary residence, swelled by 46,000 last year to a record 218,200 as the world’s richest people benefited from ‘almost an explosion of wealth’ during the recovery from the pandemic.”
The combined wealth of the UHNW individuals now equals $35.5 trillion worldwide. Together with the wealth of the Very HNWIs (holding from $10 million to $30 million in liquid assets) and “mere” high-net-worth individuals (with $1 million to $10 million each), this represents an enormous sum of money in search of a lucrative return. After stocks and real estate, fine art is one such investment.
The survey by Art Basel & UBS Report describes a market that is global in scope, subject to geopolitical tensions and open to the use of digital formats both for trading and as an art form in itself, such as videos with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), to the extent that it opens new avenues of profitability. This market is highly speculative, with collectors selling almost as much artwork as they buy, and above all concerned with the financial over the aesthetic or cultural value of a work, so much so that 95 percent of the HNW collectors surveyed had purchased works of art sight unseen, with just over half (51 percent) regularly doing so.
While there was some lingering concern about COVID, most collectors still favor in-person interaction at art fairs and galleries with their dealers. Collectors planned to resume travel to the major art fair destinations, such as Art Basel and Miami Basel, which represent high-priced opportunities to view and purchase contemporary art. The cancellation or postponement of such international art fairs due to the pandemic represented a serious loss of revenue for not only galleries, more than a quarter of which generate 20 percent or more of their yearly revenue at such fairs, but for attendant services as well, such as air travel, accommodations, dining, etc.
Before the pandemic, “HNW collectors attended an average of 41 art-related events in 2019, including six gallery exhibitions and five art fairs. This fell to 36 in this sample in 2020.” However, with the “end of the pandemic,” the survey reports, “Art fairs have bounced back, with 74% of the HNW collectors surveyed having purchased at an art fair in the first half of 2022 (versus 54% in 2021), including both in-person and OVR [online viewing rooms] purchases. 65% reported that they had bought a work through an in-person event (up from 37% in 2021).”
The rich collectors are feeling flush. According to the report, their median “expenditure on art in the first half of 2022, at USD 180,000, already nearly doubled their spending in the entire pre-pandemic year of 2019 (USD 100,000) and is notably higher than in the entire year of 2021 (when they spent USD 164,000). And they’re not putting their wallets away. They plan to more than double their 2021 spending by year’s end.”
There is an almost desperate quality to this spending, as though HNWIs cannot store their money fast enough in assets that may better withstand an anticipated crisis in the economy. In fact, collectors were slightly more optimistic about the outlook for the art market in the next six months than they were about the state of the stock market over the same period (78 percent vs 75 percent, respectively). “They’re also buying more expensive art than last year. The share of collectors purchasing works priced at more than USD 1 million nearly doubled from 2021, from 12% to 23%. This is similar to the price levels at which they bought in 2019.”
The report pays considerable attention to geo-strategic shifts in power as reflected by trade between the major art centers. Those have traditionally been New York and London, though in recent years the combined mainland China and Hong Kong market has overtaken the UK for second place. This correlates closely with the location of the world’s wealthiest, who are still concentrated in the United States (145,000 HNWIs), as compared to roughly 50,000 in China and 10,000 or fewer in European capitals such as Paris and Berlin. It is noted that the activity of Russian oligarchs in the market has been checked somewhat by the war in Ukraine and the attendant sanctions.
The report documents how the globalization of the past 30 years has seen the development of art markets in places where they barely existed before, such as India, Mexico, Turkey and Brazil. However, the market remains highly unequal. “Its key players continue to be European and American: Sotheby’s, Christies, and Philips in the auction market; Art Basel and Frieze in the art fair sector; and David Zwirner, Gagosian, and Hauser & Wirth among others in the gallery market. If anything, globalization has strengthened their position and they face minimal competition from their counterparts in emerging regions.”
Social inequality also manifests itself strongly among artists, with one percent of them ranked as “super star” figures, with name-recognition and prestige from museum shows, whose work commands millions of dollars. The bulk of artists, 84 percent of whom are so-called “emerging” or unrepresented by galleries, do not participate in this market at all. It is also the case that even at the high end, artists themselves see only a portion of the money paid for their work, with 30 percent typically going to the gallery and the most lucrative sector being in resales. In this regard, the art market in the US is more attractive than that in Europe because it has no legislation concerning resale rights that would guarantee artists a share in future profits off their work, equivalent to royalties in music.
Despite the report’s overall emphasis that 2022 was the best of all possible worlds for the wealthy and the art market, a certain anxiety creeps into the report.
“Even at the very top of the wealth spectrum, where many HNW individuals have been insulated from some of these economic stresses, wealth has stalled its bull run. Forbes’ annual compilation of the world’s wealthiest billionaires showed a large increase in billionaire wealth throughout the pandemic, with certain industries such as tech, e-commerce, and health all flourishing.” However, the report continues, “figures published in March 2022 showed a contraction in both the number of billionaires (down by 3% on 2021) and their collective wealth (also decreasing 3%), with major losses in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine (34 fewer billionaires) and China (losing 87, with government regulation and greater scrutiny of tech companies as a main contributing factor).”
Data in a separate report from Wealth-X issued in November shows a continuation of the downward trend, with the number of UHNWIs said to have fallen by 6 percent in 2022, with double-digit losses in the US, Japan and France.
All is not lost! “But even with these losses, billionaire wealth has more than doubled in ten years, and at the very top of the billionaire list, wealth still grew in 2022, with the top ten billionaires increasing their combined wealth by 13% from March 2021 to March 2022.”
The report concludes by emphasizing, with unintended irony, how much these wealthy art collectors are committed to the betterment of life on the planet–not by making their $35.5 trillion available to meet the pressing needs of humanity, but by taking steps to reduce the carbon footprint produced by their travel and to use recyclable packaging for their art shipments, even if it means paying a little more.
Such an irrational system is not only inimical to the creation of meaningful art and culture accessible to broad masses of the population; it is as unsustainable as the financial house of cards on which it is based.
Summers: We’ll Have ‘Wile E. Coyote Kind of Moment’ with Consumption, Downturn Will ‘Be Fairly Forceful’
During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers argued it will be much more difficult to bring down inflation without a recession than many believe because “At a certain point, consumers run out of their savings, and then you have a Wile E. Coyote kind of moment where consumption falls off.” And he believes the downturn will “be fairly forceful.”
Summers said, “[I]t’s much harder than many people think to achieve a soft landing, because there are all these mechanisms that kick in. At a certain point, consumers run out of their savings, and then you have a Wile E. Coyote kind of moment where consumption falls off. At a certain point, people start putting their houses on the market and then you see house prices falling and then other people rush to put them on the market. At a certain point, you see credit drying up, and when credit dries up, people can’t pay back their old borrowing. So, there is this proposition, we’ve talked about it before on the show, David…when the unemployment rate goes up by .5%, it goes up by more than 2%. And that’s because once you get into a negative situation, there’s an avalanche aspect. And I think we have a real risk that that’s going to happen at some point.”
Summers added that “there’s an old saying that things…don’t happen as fast as you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could. And I think that may be the way it is with the downturn. I don’t know when it’s going to come, but when it kicks in, I suspect it’ll be fairly forceful.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
Richard Wolff | How THE RICH Stole Democracy
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