I think it is safe to say that the stock market is going through a very special moment in history. Not just the year-over-year returns, but the concentration of returns—more specifically to technology-fueled growth stocks. The market is somewhat paralleling what is happening to society at large in real-time. A number of left-leaning politicians rely on a 2017 study done by the Institute for Policy Studies to spotlight the glaring income inequality that exists in America today, one in which three wealthiest individuals have as much wealth as the bottom half of all Americans. And yes, that is an oft-quoted statistic by Bernie Sanders whenever he opens his mouth to justify his self-professed, socialist-flavored policies.
The wealth of those three individuals, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, stood at $245 billion at the time of the study was published in 2017. If you go by today’s figure (2/17/20), the those same three individuals (Bezos: $131B, Gates: $96.5B, and Buffett: $82.5) are still the richest three and their combined wealth increased an astonishing $65B to $310B. The latest current wealth figure of America’s bottom half isn’t available, but judging by another study done by People’s Policy Project, the trend isn’t too promising for society’s beaten up bottom 50%. We’ll let this graph do the talking:
Source: People’s Policy Project
Between the years the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and 2018, the American top 1 percent literally won the lottery when its total net worth increased by $21 trillion, while during the same period, bottom 50% got its pocket picked and actually experienced a decrease in net worth by $900 billion.
I’m all for winning lotteries and liberal-democracy-fueled capitalism, but I can see why a huge slice of society might be struggling and voting for moonshot candidates like Trump or Bernie. Unfortunately for all of us stuck in the middle, the political pendulum also, apparently, adheres to gravitational forces. In short, if the pendulum has indeed swung all the way to the right with Trump (some might say it has gone even further into ultra-right territory), it must swing all the way to the left (those same people might label it ultra-left) with someone like Bernie.
Needless to say, the pressure is on the moderates—assuming such people still exisit. We must go against the laws of political physics and catch the pendulum as it swings back to the other side following Bernie’s tenure, because for all we know, waiting on the other end might be Ivanka, Jared Kushner or God forbid, some right-wing YouTube star. The world deserves a better America.
Faisaling.com 