[quote=harvey]
The vast majority of wealth at the top tier was never bailed out.
It sucks that a bunch of people got a pass on irresponsible behavior after the housing bust, but most of them were in the middle tier. There were some at the top tier, but they only represent a small portion of the extreme wealth at the top.
I’ve mentioned this before many times and it is generally overlooked because it doesn’t fit anybody’s narrative, but take a look at who actually has the money:
Almost none of these people received bailouts.[/quote]
Of course they were. All of these people have most of their wealth associated with their stock holdings. MSFT was around $16/sh in 2009. It’s 42 and change today. Do you think that price recovery in MSFT stock would have been possible without a variety of Bailouts, QEs and accounting rule changes. If the big investment banking housing like Goldman and others were allowed to blow up then wall street today would likely be trading at a lower multiple. Would that have impacted some people in the middle and upper middle class. Yeah it would, but it would have hit those at the top harder than those in the middle.
You’re probably happy that you 401K more than doubled from some hypothetical 100K to 250K but Bill Gates went from 30 billion to over 75 billion at the same time.
