Today, the top 0.01% of the wealthiest people in America hold more of the country’s total wealth than that same group did during the Gilded Age, a time of unrestrained financial speculation—but also of grinding poverty, corruption, and racial strife. That extreme concentration of wealth is in large part attributable to the dominance of Wall Street over American life, and bankers and investors’ willingness to manufacture and exploit crises, when the spoils are greatest. The centrality of finance in the United States and across the globe arose through successive waves of neoliberal reform over the last half century involving the privatization of profits and externalization of risk.
The 2007 financial crisis led to widespread distrust of banks and government, but rather than creating a fairer economic system, it gave rise to new trends in finance that expanded speculators’ influence in the global economy and continued to facilitate massive accumulations of wealth. Since the crisis, the financial sector has
— source inthesetimes.com | Heather Gautney | Dec 22, 2022