So here we are, with a handful of winners declaring the system is working great and high-fiving each other, too busy congratulating themselves to see the tsunami of karma racing toward shore.

How to Trade In Stocks Livermore, Jesse Best Price: $8.37 Buy New $13.12 (as of 03:14 UTC - Details) It’s a toss-up which is wider: the widening gap between the top 10% and the bottom 60%, or the gap between the complacency of the top 10% and the reckoning that’s overdue. Call it karma, just desserts or the wheel of history, the unfairness and inequality of a rigged system generates blowback, and the longer it is suppressed, the greater the eventual swing of the pendulum to the opposite extreme.

But really, who cares about the bottom 60% being left in the dust by a system rigged to benefit the top 10% because hey, the S&P 500 is going to 6,000–yippee! More free money for everyone who bought assets years or decades ago before the Federal Reserve decided the best way to “boost growth” was to inflate assets to generate “the wealth effect” among those who already owned the assets being inflated.

And once the fortunate few were awarded the vast majority of the Fed’s unearned largesse–the top 10% own 93% of stocks–they have the wiggle room to ignore inflation. The bottom 60% living on wages–well, not so much.

Readers remind me that many of Americans’ financial ills are self-inflicted: poor money management, instant gratification over making sacrifices for long-term gains, getting into credit card debt with 22% interest rates, buying vehicles they can’t afford, paying $100 for an oil change instead of learning how to change the oil themselves, and so on–all of which indeed make modest financial circumstances much more difficult. Rich Man Poor Bank: Wh... Quann, Mark J Best Price: $9.69 Buy New $16.95 (as of 04:43 UTC - Details)

Having been in the bottom 60% in terms of earnings most of life, I constantly preach the virtues of frugality and anti-consumerism, learning how to do things for ourselves so we don’t have to pay for them, and building networks of reciprocity–I help you, you help me–that make all the difference between financial security and insecurity. These are the fundamentals of Self-Reliance.

But better money management doesn’t erase the rigged system that has sluiced the lion’s share of the nation’s gains to the top 10% and left the bottom 60% in the dust. If the rising tide raises all ships, then how is it the bottom 50% own a rounding-error share of the nation’s financial wealth– 2.6%:

The bottom 50% own 11% of the nation’s real estate value–a mere fourth of the 44% owned by the top 10%.

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