Wot Recovery?

“We keep talking about a recovery, which has really benefited the wealthy that own the assets; that have had the stock markets in the US and in Europe propped up by a lot of money printing. This has created inequality on a much grander scale,” Marco Pietropoli, an economist for RM Wealth Management from London said in an interview with Press TV on Friday.

The economist stated that most of the talk of economic recovery is propaganda, which has exacerbated the problem. “If you keep telling people that everything’s OK so that people go out and spend money that they haven’t got on their credit cards for the greater good – this is not how you build an economy moving forward.

Yet there is economic recovery  - for the rich

“The real demand is at the very top,” said Mr. Rushton, the president of Aviatrade, a private-jet brokerage and advisory company. “The big guys, the billionaires, have plenty of money, and they’re buying. But the middle and lower end has been much slower to recover from the crisis.”

The wealthy now have a wealth gap of their own, as economic gains become more highly concentrated at the very top. As the top one-hundredth of the 1 percent pulls away from the rest of that group, the superrich are leaving the merely very rich behind. That has created two markets in the upper reaches of the economy: one for the haves and one for the have-mores. Whether the product is yachts, diamonds, art, wine or even handbags, the strongest growth and biggest profits are now coming from billionaires and nine-figure millionaires, rather than mere millionaires.

“The very wealthy are often the ones pulling the trigger right now, and they have a very big trigger,” said Jim Taylor, a wealth specialist and managing partner of YouGov, the marketing research and survey firm.

Of course, the lesser 1 percenters are still doing just fine. The wealth of the top 1 percent grew an average of 3.9 percent a year from 1986 to 2012, though the top one-hundredth of that 1 percent saw its wealth grow about twice as fast. The 16,000 families in that  very top category — those with fortunes of at least $111 million — have seen their share of national wealth nearly double since 2002, to 11.2 percent.

Saez and Zucman wrote that a “snowballing effect” was creating extravagant wealth at the very top. Outsize incomes — fueled in part by stock — are put into savings and investments, which generate more income, which creates even more wealth.

“The really top guys are insulated from fluctuations in the economy,” Mr. Rushton said. “They’ve always got money, and they have even more today.”

It is said  a rising tide lifts allboats. Now, it is mainly lifting mega-yachts. Sales and orders of boats longer than 300 feet are at or near a record high, according to brokers and yacht builders. But prices for boats 100 to 150 feet long are down 30 to 50 percent from their peak. Jonathan Beckett, the chief executive of Burgess, the yacht broker and advisory company, put it this way: “The folks at the top feel like they’ve come through the crisis intact.” He added, “They’re a fairly confident group, and they’re saying, ‘If I’m going to build a boat, I want to do it right.’ ”