Mining The Poor.

OK we’re used to knowing the top 1% wealthies have huge amounts and the poor have next to nothing. Think of it as the poor being a Bergen Belsen survivor and the rich being a quarter ton bedridden Jaba the Hut. If it was like the law you had to carry your wealth around or eat 0.01% of it every day this couldn’t happen. It can only happen because great wealth is notional, it exists as numbers on balance sheets and it can only be created by those who know how to create big numbers on balance sheets. The poor and middle classes think very differently, that money is achieved by effort. Effort is required because they are used to the steady depreciation of everything they buy. The wealthy typically deal in things that go up and down in value, real estate, stocks, shares, currency etc. This produces two states, the profit state as value goes up and the loss state as value goes down similar to a piston in an engine. Thus profits (wealth) and losses (debts) are produced independently of each other in these two different states of an oscillating cycle. It then becomes a simple matter of ‘pumping’ supply and demand to lower and raise values (prices) and divert the rising wealth creating state one way and the falling debt creating state another. Thus finance can create a mountain of wealth and an apparently totally separate mountain of debt, one acquired by the ‘smart suits’ and the other by the ‘hardworking but feckless.’ Just as engineering has improved the internal combustion engine over the years financial engineering has improved this financial equivalent. In 2008 it became so efficient the mountain of debt it produced so overwhelmed the US property market it got fed back into the financial system like a rebounding tsunami wave. In southern Europe wealth extraction produced a similar tide of unsustainable debt. But even after this catastrophic impoverishment there appears no recognition that this financial internal combustion engine of ‘the markets’ has dented our belief in their useful social and commercial role. It’s as if there’s an excavator working between a quarry to its left and a mountain of dirt to its right and no one’s got the whit to wonder how the three might be connected. Even the suits in Wall Street and ‘the city’ don’t really consider they are mining the poor to produce their client’s dividends and their owns bonuses. If they did I believe humanity would find a better way.