P!
Oh no, no,no...just ask 0bama. It is not at all that pesky issue of wealth devaluation.
As any liberal in fact...they will tell you the rich are sitting on the sidelines with hoards of money & wealth they won’t invest.
The article focuses on housing and financial assets. Other factors resulting in loss of household wealth in recent years include:
1) Decline in real household incomes. Middle class jobs are going away.
2) Inflation. The hidden tax eroding the purchasing power of money and the result of both government and Federal Reserve policies. Food and energy prices have accelerated and take an increasing share of household income, yet food and energy inflation is not included in the government inflation statistics.
3) Negative rate of return on savings. Savings accounts, CD’s, and bond interest rates have declined due to Federal Reserve low interest rate policy.
4) Total tax burden (federal, state, local) continues to rise.
The factors above will make it difficult for households to accumulate new wealth to offset the lost wealth.
To some considerable extent this decline is not a decline in real wealth, it’s a decline in an illusion.
Some significant percentage, my inexpert estimate around 50%, is the bursting of the bubble. Bubbles, by definition, do not represent actual wealth, they’re merely an illusion.
If you happened to sell out at the height of the bubble, then it was real. But there is, also by definition, no way everybody could sell out at the right time. Therefore most people are going to get caught when the bubble pops.
So we thought we were a lot richer than we were.
It doesn’t look like there’s any consideration of savings accounts being slowly (or quickly) depleted by people who are either completely unemployed or working hand to mouth to make next month’s payments.
So how’s that shipping your entire consumer manufacturing sector off to China working for
you America?
For many years the intentional inflation of the dollar has dropped our purchasing power by a large percentage.
The impact has been especially bad in the Obama era because of the housing collapse, the jobless rate due to Obama’s business killing policies, and the Fed flooding the world with watered down dllars to support humongous deficit spending.
Since 1990 the dollar has lost about 1/3 of its purchasing power.
Time for another taxpayer funded vacation and a game of golf.
Phuk, I’ve had it. I’m only buying lead from now on.
If you HAVE a job - take all the cr@p they give you each and every day and hold on for dear life!
And even if we all do that, we’ll still be meeting one another in the future as Wal-Mart Greeters because we’ll need to work well into our 70’s and 80’s at this point...
In my case it is almost entirely a drop in housing value of 1/3. But this drop allowed my boys to buy housing which they could not have afforded five years ago. So I am not complaining too much.