Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

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Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I just want to inject here my experience in Britain during the 2008 Crash and its aftermath:

In Britain, the Finance Industry was 17% of GDP, so when the Crash happened the country was disproportionally hit.

After the crash the autorities chose to protect Asset Owner above all:

By 2015 the incomes of the top wealthier 10% of the population were growing in real terms 23% per year whilst the bottom 90% were seeing their incomes fall 1% per year in real terms.

This was roughly how thing were going for about a decade after the Crash. UK inequality is nowadays huge, social mobility near non-existent, average incomes when measured in a currency other than the pound - which went down following Brexit - have stagneted, overall economic growth anemic and concentrated in highest wealth layers since the official “growth” is mostly asset prices going up.

This is the process by which the billionaires make sure they win: everybody gets hit more or less in a Crash, but in during the subsequent period when the state is supposedly trying to fix it, you get also sorts of “extreme measures required by extreme times” that, “curiously”, help the billionaires the most, so some years later everybody but the wealthiest slices of society are worst of whilst the wealthiest are much richer even than before the Crash.

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