by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
“Biggest” or “fastest” declines in history are becoming routine characterizations in business media of everything from stocks to unemployment claims to U.S. Treasury yields and now to commodity prices. You’d have to go back to the 1930s and the Great Depression to find as many similar references.
And there was one other key characteristic that defined the early 1930s and now: unprecedented wealth inequality that had been manufactured by Wall Street running an institutionalized wealth transfer system that culminated in a stock market crash that erased 90 percent of the stock market’s value from 1929 to 1932.
The late MIT economist, Lester Thurow, explained some three decades ago what happens when wealth is concentrated in too few hands: