Never in US history have so many individuals earned over $50 million per year.

Never before has the divide between the wealthy and the poor been so wide (never).

The source of this catalyst for unrest in society, as Mark Spitznagel warned, is not runaway entrepreneurial capitalism, which rewards those who best serve the consumer in product and price. (Would we really want it any other way?) There is another force that has turned a natural divide into a chasm: the Federal Reserve. The relentless expansion of credit by the Fed creates artificial disparities based on political privilege and economic power.

The actual distribution of wealth in America is mind-boggling - the following shows the pattern of income is similar to a power-log function (often referred to by Didier Sornette as the basis for his bubble indicator)...





As Spitznagel concludes so succinctly:

"The Fed is transferring immense wealth from the middle class to the most affluent, from the least privileged to the most privileged. This coercive redistribution has been a far more egregious source of disparity than the president's presumption of tax unfairness (if there is anything unfair about approximately half of a population paying zero income taxes) or deregulation. Pitting economic classes against each other is a divisive tactic that benefits no one. Yet if there is any upside, it is perhaps a closer examination of the true causes of the problem. Before we start down the path of arguing about the merits of redistributing wealth to benefit the many, why not first stop redistributing it to the most privileged?"

Finally, while the whole 1% meme may be so 2011 (now it is more 0.001%), for those wondering if they made the "cutoff", the answer is if you made over $200,000 then yes.