According to Business Insider, the one percent has so much money they don’t know what to do with it.

Top corporations have been engaged in rigging the stock markets by buying their stocks and pushing the price of their stocks higher than would otherwise be the case. As much as 59 percent of all corporate profits have gone to stock buybacks rather than investing in new products or machinery. Until 1982, stock buybacks were illegal in the United States.

One of the more obvious things corporations could do with this money would be to pay their workers more, but “that would be terrible for the stock market,” said Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics. However, paying their employees more would stimulate the demand for goods and services, but doing so would leave less financial wiggle room for corporations to buy back more of their own shares, which would then depress the value of those shares, while devaluing the stock options received by CEOs.

In other words, stock options are good for CEOs but bad for the rest of the economy as a whole.

Corporations spent $1.1 trillion in stock buybacks in 2018, and they are “on track to surpass that number this year. But they still have record cash holdings of close to $3 trillion.

“Wealthy households and individuals, according to the report, are pouring money into asset managers, betting on companies that lose $1 billion a year, bonds from little-known Middle Eastern republics, and giving hot Silicon Valley start-ups more venture capital than they can handle.

And private equity companies have seen so much cash flow that these firms have $2 trillion of unused capital.

But even that hasn’t been enough to account for all the new money. The top 1% of US households are holding a record $303.9 billion of cash, a quantum leap from the under $15 billion they held just before the financial crisis.”

In other words, the rich are sitting on $303.9 billion and don’t know what to do with it, corporations are sitting on $3 trillion and don’t know what to do with it, private equity firms are sitting on $2 trillion and don’t know what to do with it. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars the rich, corporations and private equity firms have invested have been used to create a large unsustainable financial bubble that will burst with the coming of the next recession.

Given that after-tax corporate profits are down for the last two quarters for which statistics have been fully completed and given the inversion of the yield curve (which has always signaled the coming of recessions since the 1970s), all those trillions of dollars will likely vanish into nothingness when the bubble bursts. However, had the majority of that money gone to pay increases, which would have stimulated demand for goods and services, the economy would likely continue on its growth trajectory with greater Gross Domestic Product growth.

This unequal distribution of income and wealth has been brought about due to inequality in the political markets. The golden rule has been used to bring this about. He who has the gold makes the rules.

The report blames free trade for placing significant pressure downward on wages, the Trump tax cuts for the rich and their corporations which have provided even more money for corporations to buy back their shares, thereby jacking up their share prices and allowing them to give more and higher dividends to shareholders.

Click here for the report from Business Insider.