Wealth of richest 400 Americans surges to $2.29 trillion! Yowsa! Yowsa! Yowsa!

[Octafish]

58. Who stepped in to fill the void with dollars? The Washington Greenrefs.

The bank bailout and the Forbes 400

Andre Damon
World Socialist Web Site, 8 October 2014

Six years ago this past Friday, the US Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which established the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, the first of the bank bailouts. It was followed by a series of Federal Reserve and Treasury programs that allocated some $7 trillion in free loans to the financial system.

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Earlier this year, Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury Secretary who now heads a private equity firm, published his memoir, which makes clear that every single substantial policy question related to the financial crisis was decided solely from the standpoint of maximizing the most predatory profit interests of Wall Street.

According to Geithner, by September 2008 it became clear to the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve that every major US financial institution was insolvent, and would go bankrupt without government intervention. Under these circumstances, the Federal Reserve and Treasury allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse, a move that had the effect, to use a phrase recalled by Geithner, of “shock(ing) the political world into taking the crisis seriously.”

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Which brings us back to the Forbes 400. Beyond the total mass of wealth that the rich now control, the most salient fact revealed in the report is the manner in which this wealth has been, to use the word loosely, “earned.” As the magazine began its report, “Thanks to a buoyant stock market, the richest people in the US just keep getting richer.” A “buoyant stock market”—that is, through speculation on an historically unprecedented scale, aided and abetted by the government and the Federal Reserve.

Finance is increasingly dominant among America’s wealthy. While the finance and real estate sectors made up about 4.4 percent of the first Forbes 400 in 1982, they now make up 21 percent. Beyond those who derive their wealth immediately from the financial sector, the fortunes of billionaires in other sectors of the economy is increasingly based on share values. For example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, currently 11th on the list with a net worth of $34.1 billion, had his wealth increase seventeen-fold from 2009 as a result of Facebook’s speculative initial public offering.

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/08/pers-o08.html

When the referees get off the same bus as the opposing team, it's a sign the game is rigged.

When the final score approaches 100 to nothing, year after year after year, you know the game is.