Trust in Capitalism is Breaking down for GenZ

The Capitalism we once knew, no longer exists.

Housing affordability, a breakdown of the social contact of the American consumer with capitalism, is breaking down for millions of people. Many of them belong to the GenZ and Millennial generation. There’s not just political divide in America, there’s real generational divides about how society is run today in 2022.

Boomers grew up with a “greed is good” mantra. Their grandchildren aren't so sure. This is causing a massive ideological shift in the “Great Resignation” era and the post WFM workplace.

This article was first published on FutureSin, you can subscribe there if this concerns or alarms you as well. FutureSin is about the environment and other macro trends we face in the present that is our immediate future.

Greed without regulation leads to very poor outcomes, as humanity will find out in the dystopian 21st century.

We may not survive the existential conflicts that will arise due to central bank stimulus on how Capitalism works. Humanity has acquired a kind of wealth-inequality debt that will accelerate how Capitalism will begin to break down in the 2022 to 2032 period.

This is our thesis, read it at your own leisure:

If the pandemic has not augmented the elite’s power over us and divided us from each other, what has it done?

Billionaires in 2021 have more wealth than 4.6 Billion people. Younger professionals in China and the U.S. have no path to housing affordability or even in many cases, the luxury of starting a family.

In 2021, billionaires saw the steepest increase in their share of wealth on record, according to The World Inequality Lab’s annual World Inequality Report. Just 7 companies make up the bulk of the NASDAQ 100, as even the Fed’s QE benefited those at the top the most.

Fed QE Was and Is Exaggerated Protecting the Wealth of the Elite

Central Banks seem to stimulate so the wealthy protect their wealth. The top 0.01% got a nearly 10% percent raise in 2020 — that’s five times more than the bottom 90%. Inflation in the short-term is growing twice as fast as hourly incomes, and that’s a problem for the health of American capitalism, already plagued by wealth and racial inequality.

Silicon Valley, already a place where women don’t have equal representation in Venture capital or Management of America’s most important technology companies. The lack of inclusion has also lead to a centralization of BigTech that could accelerate the wealth-inequality debt and destroy capitalism and consumerism as we know it within a generation or two.

Capitalism is not working, nor does it seem democracy is during the pandemic. In America alone, U.S. Billionaire Wealth Surged by 70%, or $2.1 Trillion, During Pandemic; They Are Now Worth a Combined $5 Trillion.

Even the greatest Tycoons seem to have ulterior motives for what they do. Think Jack Dorsey in Bitcoin, or Elon Musk in SpaceX.

The Billionaire Class Lowers GDP for the Rest of Society

Global inequality is shockingly entrenched and vast and the number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade. Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar, who is in Davos to represent the Oxfam confederation this year said: “The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies, and too few governments are committed to these.” The Fed’s miss on inflation is a shocking turn of events.

Trust in Government, BigTech, Central banks and the banking sector is at an all-time low. This isn’t by accident, Capitalism is not working.

Covid-19 has been such a great boon for the elite, some are wondering if it wasn’t an intentional design. The top 0.01% richest individuals — the 520,000 people who have at least $19 million — now hold 11% of the world’s wealth, up a full percentage point from 2020, the report found. Meanwhile, the share of global wealth owned by billionaires has grown from 1% in 1995 to 3% in 2021.

“Since wealth is a major source of future economic gains, and increasingly, of power and influence, this presages further increases in inequality,” economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who won a 2019 Nobel prize for their research on poverty, wrote in the introduction of the recent report.

Wages grew by nearly 10% for the top 0.01% in 2020, compared to just 1.7% for the bottom 90%. Escalating inflation, evictions and young men dropping out of the labor force more and more the last twenty years has America on the brink of civil war.

Wealth Inequality at Scale Will Lead to Civil Unrest

We live in a world where the 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa.

A new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra found the top 1% and top 0.1% saw “historically high wage levels and shares of all wages” in 2020.

“Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist,” Behar said. If Capitalism is not a pyramid scheme, what is it?

Consumers are manipulated at scale on apps, on American Ads platforms, in search and even while playing video games and on futurist “metaverse” products for profit. We are putting profit before health and human rights on a consistent basis in our online products. Where will that lead America?

During the pandemic, a lot of women couldn’t work. Women do more than three-quarters of all unpaid care work. They often have to work reduced hours or drop out of the workforce because of their care workload. Across the globe, 42 percent of women of working age cannot get jobs because they are responsible for all the caregiving, compared to just six percent of men.

Billionaire men aren’t being good custodians of the planet. Neither are BigTech executives or Congress or leaders of Central banks.

America’s billionaires have grown $2.1 trillion richer during the pandemic, their collective fortune skyrocketing by 70 percent — from just short of $3 trillion at the start of the COVID crisis on March 18, 2020, to over $5 trillion on October 15 of this year, according to Forbes data analyzed by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS).

The Fundamentals of Capitalism are Breaking Down

How much more do we need to suffer before the system needs to be reworked? How long will it take to have a society where equality, freedom and dignity for all exists? It may no longer be possible in America. Capitalism isn’t just broken, the American Dream is dead.

Massive programs unique to the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States meant to infuse cash into the pockets of all Americans did successfully mitigate some of that inequality, the study found. This only made the rich grow richer under the Fed’s watchful eyes talking about a “temporary inflation”. The lower middle class and lower class will be suffering with inflation for a very long time.

America seems more intent on keeping its existing influence in the world than fixing its own broken system. In America, real average hourly earnings when accounting for inflation, actually decreased 0.5% for the month. A 0.9% inflation increase negated a 0.4% rise in wages. This is not a political statement, but an economic one.

U.S. politicians are trying to pretend we are in an economic recovery, when consumer confidence is plummeting. Where is the freedom we once knew in America? Americans have been quitting at near-record rates for the majority of the year. The Great Resignation is showing an extreme distaste for an exploitive system of Capitalism that doesn’t provide equal opportunity.

We are acquiring wealth-inequality debt that progressively will continue to erode our system of Capitalism and trust in corporations, BigTech, democracy and the government. This could lead to anarchy if we don’t regulate wealth inequality, just ask young people if you think this article is far-fetched.

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So where does the cultural debt of greed lead to? It’s nothing short of the breakdown of trust in civilization and our systems that no longer serve the common individual.