The Nerve Center Of Our Economic “Matrix” Revealed

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

I know I write about the widening wealth gap a lot. But I keep coming back to it because I feel like a sleuth who has found a loose string that I know eventually leads to cracking the case. I feel like Morpheus describes to Neo in the Matrix, when he first meets him and explains his pull toward the Matrix. Maybe you feel the same.

“Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.”

— Morpheus to Neo, The Matrix

With the wealth gap, and its current and past trajectory, every time I pull on it, every time another piece of economic data comes out, and every time somebody asks why the economy feels so profoundly different depending on which side of the wealth divide you sit, I wind up in exactly the same place.

And that place is I think I think I can see, with increasing clarity, what is fundamentally wrong with the American economy. And I think the longer we refuse to deal with it, the greater the chances that the eventual resolution comes through some combination of economic crisis, political upheaval, civil unrest or a wholesale rejection of the system that created it.

The latest evidence comes from a Wall Street Journal analysis of new Federal Reserve wealth data, and the numbers are astonishing.

The top 0.1% of American households have more than doubled their wealth since the end of 2019. Read that again…more than doubled…in six years.

Roughly 137,000 households now control about $28 trillion, representing around 15% of the roughly $186 trillion in total American wealth. Average wealth for a household in this tiny group now exceeds $200 million.

Since 2019, these households have accumulated another $14.5 trillion in wealth, with roughly $10 trillion of that coming from stocks and mutual funds. In the 12 months through June 30 alone, while the S&P 500 gained 21%, the top 0.1% collected nearly $4 trillion in....(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).