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Saying that the majority of the country's economic gains in recent years have gone to the top 1 percent of the income ladder understates the trend," said Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research.
Indeed, the top 1 percent of U.S. citizens earn as much as the bottom 33 percent together (about 100 million people), according to Ted Howard, executive director of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland.
While the U.S. economy grew 160 percent between 1973 and 2005, those in the top 0.01 income bracket saw their income levels rise by 250 percent. During this same period, the average real income for the bottom 90 percent actually dropped 11 percent.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39594
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The weak dollar has caused sales of US companies to foreign investors and companies this year to reach a record mark both in number of companies sold, and price total. Amongst the top investors are Saudi Arabia and china. With America buying goods in China with a value five times as high as the total of Chinese buyings in America (2006: $288 mio compared to $55 mio), and a dollar that is destined to become even weaker, this trend is unlikely to change so soon. The opposite is the case, it seems: foreigners have started to buy bridges, key road installation and similiar traffic hotspots as well. All this will not help to restrengthen the dollar, and it seems we have entered a vicious circle here. Which of course starts to become a problem for european economy as well, which already starts to feel the damage from a too strong Euro: projected growth rates had to be reduced due to the low dollar and the expensive export perspectives (especially of interest for germany, of course, which regarding size of national economy also has been driven from third to fourth place in the world by China some weeks ago). To keep internal consummation and financial markets liquid, even more money will be pumped into the market by the Fed, and interest rates will remain low and see further cuts. Which keeps inflation spinning, of course.
The american deficit and debts are bringing all of us into trouble. Instead of investing into silly wars that cannot be won and thus will be run for years and years coming (seeing the American armories and military contractors being the big winner of this), America should bring it's trade and finances back into order. The mortgage crisis is just the beginning of the future troubles that raise at the horizon, and they are raising fast. and if cou read carefully, you can see more and more brokers giving hefty warnings of a future crash that likely will outclass the "black Friday" and "black Monday" in size and quality, with quite some very famous names now joining these voices. It's a giant bubble we are sitting on. Question is not if it will burst or not, but when. the result from this as well as the upspeeding inflation could bring global economy into a devastating recession - independantly from each other.