America

Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

The chart below is simply horrifying. Not only are these median net worth figures scary, realize that 50% of the households in the country have less than these figures. Having a a net worth of less than $200,000 as you approach or enter retirement is a recipe for disaster. When 70% to 80% of that net worth is tied up in your house, you are nothing but a dead retiree walking. You should acquire a taste for cat food and learn how to panhandle for money.

It's not just "angry blue collar white men," that are supporting Donald Trump. Having received a record number of votes in a Republican nomination campaign and winning in some of the richest and best-educated counties in the country adding to victories in his more traditional strongholds of white working-class neighborhoods, statistician Nate Silver found - after reviewing exit poll data in 23 states - that Trump voters' median household income was higher than the median in every state, sometimes by a wide margin; and that 44% of Trump voters have c

I want to endorse the bulk of this Ross Douthat blog post about how even people who hate the status quo need to recognize how Donald Trump could make things much worse:

I would invite the Trump-curious to think about the two signal crises of the Bush years, 9/11 and the financial crisis, and imagine each one with Donald Trump installed as president of the United States.

You might recall from a few months ago my linking to this great essay about “A Message From Trump’s America” by Michael Cooper, a liberal Democrat and a lawyer in rural North Carolina. Excerpt:

My Republican friends are for Trump. My state representative is for Trump. People who haven’t voted in years are for Trump. He’ll win the primary here on March 15 and he will carry this county in the general.

With the collapse of China's smoke-and-mirrors commodity bubble comes the post-mortem as the horde of Chinese gamblers flood from one government-appointed market to another as the American dream of get-rich-quick schemes appears to have been adopted by the burgeoning middle classes now disillusioned with real work. As Bloomberg reports so shockingly, from the Dutch tulip craze of 1637 to America’s dot-com bubble at the turn of the century, history is littered with speculative frenzies that ended badly for investors; but rarely has a mania escalated so rapidly, and spurred s