Seems like everybody must be rich, have you noticed that no one goes to work anymore? I spoke with some people recently and they were like, “I just decided to take this or that week off [work]”. Not showing up for work is on “auto-pilot” for most these days, and I tell you it must be contagious! That’s why I still play the lottery whenever it approaches $1 billion dollars or more. See, my real goal is to have more money than I do sense. At this writing I only have the opposite, I still possess more sense than I do money. But once my fortune turns you’ll be the first to detect it right here on Brantology.com because I plan to re-define “stupid” as my follow-on goal? 🙂

Looking back, these past two decades will go down in American history as a time of unequaled prosperity [for most]. It all sounds great on the surface until one realizes [like I have] that in many cases it was largely unearned. When you really look under the hood at this new wealth accumulation phase you find out some interesting things happened as [simultaneously] investors threw caution out the window. After all, cash was virtually free for the borrowing, it was void of any “true” carry cost and add to that this phase lasted for around two decades. But could those days of unequaled prosperity now be over? If someone were to ask me, “what does the future hold?” I wouldn’t have any more details than any other prognosticator possesses, other than to add one small piece of advice – the backdrop will most likely be in stark contrast to what we’ve known the past 20 years. In fact, I’m predicting a scenario that looks quite a bit different. We’re likely to be entering a time that reminds us of that old Smith Barney commercial from the 1980’s. Remember the one with John Houseman sporting a bow tie on television espousing that at Smith Barney “we make money the old-fashioned way – we earn it!” How novel was this idea? We almost forgot what it was like to exude personal fiscal responsibility but our future will look more like that in my humblest of opinions. So if I were employed today I would prepare myself for an “uphill climb” versus that “downhill sprint” so many of us enjoyed. 😉

How frightening could it be, right? Just the thought of having to earn our own keep is a notion I’d bet many Americans will find profoundly troubling. Just think, having to get up in the morning, get dressed and then commute to work and actually perform at a high level, higher than the personal overhead your employer is paying to keep you onboard, I mean ouch right? But that’s the way this country was built, it was not built on SPACS, corporate takeovers, and other forms of blind-assed capital. Perhaps this will be our “Back to the Future” moment, from where we once were as a country.

I found the newly-formed American Bourgeoisie described in these surprising statistics, [from various sources]:
– Currently, there are almost 22 million millionaires living in the United States, or about 9% of the adult population.
– The average millionaire in the United States is 57 years old.
– While these people come from a variety of professions, the one profession that produced the most millionaires was finance and investments.
– 88% of current millionaires hold at least one college degree with more than 50% of them having earned advanced degrees.
– Which higher education institution they attended appears not to have made a difference, only 8% of U.S. millionaires were educated at elite prestigious universities.
– There are about 720 billionaires living in the United States today, and roughly 2,700 globally.
– In the U.S. only the cities of New York and San Francisco are home to more billionaires than the city of Dallas, Texas, where 18 billionaires now make residence.
– 33% of millionaires living in the United States are women.
– Having $1 million dollars places you in the top 10% of wealth in the United States. To be included in the top 1% requires a net worth of at least $11 million dollars.
– New Jersey is home to the highest percentage of millionaire households, almost 10%, followed by Maryland and Connecticut, Hawaii is also high on this list.
– Asians make up less than 7% of the U.S. population but have the highest propensity to become millionaires of any other ethnic group, currently 22% are millionaires.
– From the year 2000 to 2020 the aggregate wealth of millionaires around the world nearly quadrupled. *

* Read that last sentence over again then ask yourself, “Why is that – how could this occur?” This fact is the whole reason why I wrote on the subject above, there’s only one way this could happen, actually it was a combination of a one-two punch, the product of two important things working together and only one of them is detrimental to our financial health –
1) A lower tax rate environment,
And drum roll_________________!
2) Interest rates at [or near] zero for an extended period of time.
The number 2 reason above is the number 1 recipe for asset price bubbles to form, and form they did… it’s quite simple. Now what many lawmakers will get wrong is just how to deflate all these speculative price bubbles without turning many of these new American millionaires into thousand- and- hundred-aires. That’s a much more difficult exercise and a book yet to be written… Stay tuned! 😉