Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall

Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall

Chris Richards for The New York Times

John McAfee is auctioning off this property in New Mexico to pay bills. His worth has fallen to about $4 million from a peak of about $100 million.


By DAVID LEONHARDT and GERALDINE FABRIKANT
Published: August 20, 2009


The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent.


Mr. McAfee, who made his fortune in antivirus software, bought the property to have a place to fly open-cockpit planes with his friends.

They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality.

But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.

For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.

The relative struggles of the rich may elicit little sympathy from less well-off families who are dealing with the effects of the worst recession in a generation. But the change does raise several broader economic questions. Among them is whether harder times for the rich will ultimately benefit the middle class and the poor, given that the huge recent increase in top incomes coincided with slow income growth for almost every other group. In blunter terms, the question is whether the better metaphor for the economy is a rising tide that can lift all boats — or a zero-sum game.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/economy/21inequality.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

:wtf:

Boo FUCKING hoo! :grr: :thumbsdown:

searching for loopholes. The people outlined within this article are the embodiment of "ugliness" and "greed."

:rofl:

It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of vampires!

I thought perhaps their camels they were riding on were unable to fit through the eye of a needle, which, if memory serves, was the name of a narrow gate in a wall somewhere in the Middle East.

Their plight is breaking my fucking heart. :sarcasm:

One day, he realized, as he said, “Whoa, my cash is gone.”

His remaining net worth of about $4 million makes him vastly wealthier than most Americans, of course. But he has nonetheless found himself needing cash and desperately trying to reduce his monthly expenses.

He has sold a 10-passenger Cessna jet and now flies coach. This week his oceanfront estate in Hawaii sold for $1.5 million, with only a handful of bidders at the auction. He plans to spend much of his time in Belize, in part because of more favorable taxes there.

By cheating on their taxes through off shore accounts, faked exemptions and bush give aways, they have decimated the economy and government. By pushing through unprecedented gifts to huge corporations (TARP, No negotiations for medicine in Medicare, No fees for drilling out our oil on federal land, huge rip offs through federal contracts) they have stolen from the average American to line their slimy pockets.

They have shipped off good paying jobs, that supported the largest consumer market in the history of the world, in order to make a few more bucks now. They have cheated, swindled and conned their way to wealth but have wrecked havoc on the consumer market.

Now, the uber wealthy are making less. Who would have predicted it?

That is it in a nutshell.

You cannot get wealthy off the backs of others and expect it to last forever.

The big problem here is our economy is based mostly on consumption. You can't eviscerate the middle class and expect consumption by that class to continue. When consumers stop buying, everyone gets hurt, and since the middle class is largely responsible for driving the economy, what happens to them eventually impacts everyone else.

I guess the wealthy figured they could stay inside and count their money during the down times, and wait them out.

Think again.

I feel no sympathy for these people. McAfee bought that place so he'd have a place to fly open-cockpit planes with his friends? Give me a break! How many other places does this man own? And his anti-virus software program is a resource hog and slows computers down.

No sympathy. They are largely responsible for the problem. Greed is a sin, is it not?

but trend and kaspersky are far better.

Hell, having a heterogeneous environment (many platforms, not just one) would be exponentially more secure than "windows everywhere", but bill gates wanted his way too. (Indeed, given the rate of technological advances and the release of capable processors, client side computing should be AT LEAST 128-bit by now, if not 256-bit (the first 256-bit processor coming out around 2005). He sat on his laurels and made excuses for stomping on everyone else. As did Intel, for stagnating society with 32-bit processors... it took AMD to bring about 64-bit computing and making it backward compatible has hampered too...)

You don't realize it's running unless it's getting a major update while you've got several things running.

NOT. Welcome to Planet Economic Pain, we have much to teach you fools.

Sounds like McAfee was wheeling and dealing more than investing. Those with "solid" investments lost 20% or maybe 30% but not such a huge amount. Sounds like he was playing in real estate and other bought into Madoff-type ponzi schemes.

No pity here for the dude...and I've known others who thought they were financial wizards only to see their gambles go bust.

Purveyor of crapware gets a taste of the pain he's inflicted on countless others...

I am not going to elaborate