Where have all the assets gone?

[phantom power]

I've written at length before about ideological battle between those who want to increase asset values, and those who want to see wage growth. To make a long story short, a variety of forces, the strongest of which are globalization and increased access to an endless supply of cheap labor, have conspired to depress wages. Rather than do the hard work of fixing the system to help a globally connected world synchronize in harmony with broad-based wage growth, policy makers chose to disguise the lack of wage growth by maximizing asset growth, and attempted to push as many people as possible away from wage orientation and into asset orientation, specifically stock investments and housing.

Some of the decision to do this was simply a question of taking the lazy way out of the problem. Some of it was a craven desire to help plutocratic campaign donors steal away more wealth. And some of it was ideological fervor, as with Ronald Reagan, who said in 1975:

"Roughly 94 percent of the people in capitalist America make their living from wage or salary. Only 6 percent are true capitalists in the sense of deriving income from ownership of the means of production...We can win the argument once and for all by simply making more of our people Capitalists."

All of American policy was designed to cheapen the price of goods, to extend credit, and to maximize the prices of assets in attempt to create more Capitalists and hide the fact that wages were declining against inflation, and that non-bubble-related jobs were disappearing.

...

The attempt to disguise wage stagnation and decline with asset growth has been a marked failure on many levels, not least of which is the obvious fact that not enough Americans have access to enough wealth to make the model work. Cheap, easy access to homeownership was supposed to be the main fix for that. But that blew up just a few years ago, taking the entire economy with it. 401Ks were supposed to be another fix, but people have lost confidence in those too, as those who own substantial enough 401Ks to retire never know just how big their nest egg will be from year to year, while those without significant 401Ks or union pensions don't have much retirement at all beyond Social Security.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/where-have-all-assets-gone-by.html

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[Demeter]

2. Most of those "Assets" are WORTHLESS Pieces of Paper

some intentional frauds, some bets that didn't pay off, some for which no conclusion can be reached.

Not unlike baseball cards--collect a whole set!