The (Very) Rich Get (Much) Richer: Opinion

What about the trillionaires?

There is somewhere in the vicinity of $200 trillion in total debt floating around the global economy comprising total sovereign, corporate, and personal debt. Who holds the IOUs?

It's not governments. They're all debtors. It's not the corporations. They're (almost) all leveraged-to-the-hilt with debt, because in the Age of the Oligopoly all their time, energy and financial resources are going into buying up other corporations. It's certainly not the Little People. Even in (supposedly) "wealthy" Western economies, personal debt-levels have never been higher, meaning net wealth has never been lower.

We know from Bloomberg's own numbers the total wealth of the (supposed) "richest people" is a mere $1.9 trillion and that is all of their wealth combined. Who is holding the IOUs on the other 99% of this $200 trillion in debt? The trillionaires.

These are the people who are so wealthy that their wealth hasn't even been "discovered" yet by the sleuths at Bloomberg -- and likely never will. Even at currently artificially low interest rates, these Vampire Trillionaires blood-suck the global economy for $trillions every year in interest payments alone.

This is why (real) economic growth is now impossible for all but the most-robust (or least-indebted) economies. In a $70 trillion global economy, we have the trillionaires skimming roughly 10% per year off the top, for themselves. What readers must understand is that this "taxation" of the entire global economy by the Trillionaires -- in the form of interest payments -- is essentially nothing less than the proceeds of crime.

We start with income taxation, a form of taxation which (as a matter of arithmetic) must impoverish the bottom-80% over time, turning them into debtors. Most of the rest of the top-20% prosper moderately under this extremely corrupt form of taxation, while (as we have seen) the oligarchs get a complete free ride.

With the bottom 80% turned into impoverished debtors, this starves our consumption-based economies of revenue. This "revenue crisis", in turn, turns our governments into massive debtors. Even modest levels of public/social services can no longer be maintained by the trickle of tax revenue flowing in.

These $trillions per year which the trillionaires are siphoning out of the global economy (and into their own wealth hoards) are being extorted out of the global economy via an entirely corrupt economic system.

The very, very rich are not simply getting much, much richer. They are doing so by stealing from everyone else.

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This article was written by an independent contributor, separate from TheStreet's regular news coverage.

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