The Wealth Gap Is Accelerating Out-Of-Control | Lacy Hunt, Judy Shelton, Darius Dale & others

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**Adam Taggart** (0:56)
What you can see here is that the top 10% is running away from the bottom 90%, but that itself is dwarfed by the top 1%, just skyrocketing higher in terms of the wealth that's concentrating in the pockets of the very few up at the top there. This is a societal challenge is probably the nicest way I can say it. Some might call this a societal calamity.
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Welcoming you back here for a special video. In this video, we're gonna talk about a chart that's making its way around the internet right now. I'll put it up here real briefly. But this is a chart of net personal wealth, and it shows you the breakdown of that between the top 1%, the top 10%, the bottom half of society, and then the bottom 50th and 90th percentile. This is all in the US. And what you can see here is that the top 10% is running away from the bottom 90%, but that itself is dwarfed by the top 1% just skyrocketing higher in terms of the wealth that's concentrating in the pockets of the very few up at the top there. This is a societal challenge is probably the nicest way I can say it. Some might call this a societal calamity. You've heard me talk folks many times on this channel about the K-shaped recovery that we've largely been in since COVID. The K-shape is to capture the top end of the K is really the top part of society that's continuing to do quite well. The larger bottom part of the K is supposed to signify the bottom 80%, maybe as this chart shows, bottom 90%, really increasingly starting to fall behind or increasingly continuing to fall behind. I have of late started warning about how this trajectory if left unchecked, may bring us to what I consider to be a lower case I shaped economy, meaning a small number of people at the top, where the wealth and the advantage has fully concentrated, and then the rest of society is the bottom half of the I just again getting increasingly left behind. You look at a chart like the one I just showed, definitely shows you that we are hurtling right now towards that I shaped destiny. So it raises a bunch of questions. What does that mean for society? Is this a fait accompli or can we reverse this? And probably more importantly, more relevant to all you viewers, what can we do as individuals to make sure that if there is going to be a continuing wealth gap, that we at least individually try to fall on the right side of that to protect ourselves and those we love about, and then obviously what could we do to help society? Before we do that though, I just want to make an official announcement here. The fall online conference for Thoughtful Money is now officially open and ready for ticket purchase. So this is going to be, the conference itself is going to be on Saturday, October 19th. It's an all-day event. If you've watched our previous online conferences, you know what to expect. If you haven't, folks, it is a fantastic day, packed with over 10 hours of presentations and live Q&A with the best minds and money in the markets. This year is going to be absolutely no exception. The faculty that we're building for this looks on track to be our best ever. Just to throw out a couple of names, Lacy Hunt will do the kickoff keynote as he has done in our previous conferences. If you have seen them, folks, you know that these are graduate level seminars in macro and monetary matters. This year again will be no exception. Lacy is going to walk through a bunch of new charts explaining where he sees things going on the macro side of things. He'll be followed by James Grant, the godfather of interest rates, very important this year where we're now starting to, looks like we're going to be switching to an era of Fed rate cuts coming over the rest of this year and early next year. We'll have Judy Shelton joining us for the first time ever. As you know, Judy has been in the running for a Fed seat. She is a highly influential advisor to the current president's economic team. They'll be followed by Darius Dale on his latest market update. We'll have Michael Howell giving us the latest update on liquidity. We'll have Grant Williams and Stephanie Pomboy together, giving their latest macro and market outlook. We've got a number of other people that are scheduled as well. I'm going to reserve those names to announce later on as we get closer to the event. But as you can tell, folks, this is going to be a phenomenal event. Don't worry if you can't actually watch the conference live on Saturday, October 18th, because replay videos of the entire event, all the presentations, all the live Q&A will be sent to everybody who buys a ticket for the conference. So, if you're interested in learning more about the conference and hopefully in signing up for it, you want to go to thoughtfulmoney.com/conference.