Pot Calls Kettle Black
On CBS This Morning last week, Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claimed that income inequality is destabilizing the United States.
In a sanitized version of something we said in North Braddock, when presented with an obvious truth, “No kidding, Sherlock!”
Blankfein went further. He predicted that the divisions in our economy, between the less-than-1% and the rest of us, could get wider. He then postulated that such divisions, based in politics, could negatively affect the ability of our economy to grow. His solution? Make the pie grow. “Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people," he said.
Again, no sausage, Sherlock.
"People are trying to grapple with the reasons for it," Blankfein said. "So for example, technology, media, the new economy. If you do something really well, the entire world beats a path to your door. The number three, number five, number 400 player gets nothing. It's almost a winner take all."
But just who are the winners? CEOs like Blankfein. At least some of them have the grace to admit that they’ve become the new privileged class. Warren Buffet comes to mind in that context. But folks like Blankfein, who oversees about $915 billion in managed assets and 32,900 employees at Goldman Sachs, seem not to have gotten the memo. He never mentioned the fact that the average CEO salary has increased 127 times faster than the wages of those they supervise, and that this might have something to do with income inequality and the political divisiveness it engenders.
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