BEST INVESTMENT BOND

Ten percent of American society is doing better, much better than they ever have been, better than anyone or any class ever has done in history. This 10% constitutes the hands-down winners of American society. They own well over 2/3 of all wealth in the nation and five percent owns most of that. What is called the middle class has been drained of its wealth over the last few decades and that wealth has mostly gone to the ten percent.

As far as America's decimated working class, on average whatever wealth they owned hasn't drained, it has hemorrhaged and the beneficiaries of their catastrophe has been the ten percent.

What has occurred, and is occurring, is a socially engineered massive transfer of wealth from We The People to a smaller and smaller portion of the owner class. What has papered over this tragic occurrence is paper, better known as credit. With credit it can appear that you have wealth but you do not, as millions Amercans are now finding out.

Credit has predominantly come from two primary sources, one are revolving credit cards and the other has or had been from loans taken out of home equity; home equity based upon more paper estimates of a house's market value, a value that was obviously the result of what is called an economic bubble.

The average credit card, when minimum monthly payments are made, will take the lender fifty years to pay off. But when, not if, payments are missed or even late over fifty years, a credit card that has been dormant for years, meaning that it has not been used to buy anything for years, nevertheless often does increase, not decrease in the amount of money 'owed'. This despite the fact that the original debt may have been paid off not once, but quite often twice, and sometimes even three times over the decades. You still owe on the credit card.

Why? If you think of 300% interest or more as being the real-life-time terms of the debt buried under all the fine print, you are getting close. But that 300% can and often will become 400% ad infinitum. It is not only revolving, it is spiraling and all of this by purposeful design.

We used to have usury laws but we don't anymore and one of the last, created under the Franklin Roosevelt administration, was ended under the Democratic Clinton administration and that made the present mortgage crisis possible.

Now the only debate is will the bubble pop or just deflate. No talking heads now pontificate that there was no bubble and is no bubble as they had done only a few months ago. (Do you remember that far back?) Almost no economist really thinks that the economy is structurally sound although a corrupt few will say so publicly if there is something in it for them.

The truth is that no economy is sound when it is based on either investment or credit. Productivity, true productivity, is what makes an economy sound, certainly not I'll lend you the money to pay for the gas guzzling SUV I want to sell you.

But here is the final irony. If We The People decided to follow our mother's or father's advice and only spend what we have earned or saved, then the world would be instantly cast into the pit of a depression ne economic collapse that will make the nineteen-thirties feel like a cake walk. We tear up our credit cards as a society at our own peril. That is the ugly truth.

We told the Russians that their economy was bogus and could not and would not work, and they believed us and went over to our side. We told the Chinese the same thing but the problem is not that, unlike what seemed to have happened in the Soviet Union, capitalism can’t be creative and innovative almost infinitely. What it cannot survive is its own tendency towards efficiency. For under capitalism efficiency is necessarily defined as producing as little as possible and getting paid as much as possible for it. This means reducing labor costs, reducing quality or quantity as much as is possible too – at least as much as you can get away with. This means, among other things, selling sizzle not steak because sizzle is cheaper. The countervailing force is supposed to be competition but as fewer and fewer players gobble up ever more wealth and production capacities eventually what goes are markets.

What we face now is a worldwide quantum leap in efficiency which necessarily means a diminishing of markets, for consumers need wealth or at least salaries or wages to buy the products and services made so efficiently or delivered by mostly third-world wage-slaves and increasingly robots and computers that don't even make fifty cents an hour like factory workers command in places like Cambodia.

The nations of earth are still divided into three segments once called the First, Second, and Third Worlds. These are places where people have money to buy products and services such as Australia, Iceland, or the USA, and places where goods and services and, increasingly, commodities originate such as India or China where most people are not paid enough t

"My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me."- Steve Maraboli