Courtesy of Pam Martens
Stephen Colbert Suggested This Christmas Card for Jamie Dimon
The General Accountability Office (GAO) released a sobering study yesterday that looks at how much 55-64 year olds have been able to set aside for retirement. The short answer is: excruciatingly too little. Why that is happening can best be summed up by a headline out this morning at Bloomberg News: Jamie Dimon Becomes Billionaire Ushering in Era of the Megabank.
The GAO study found the following: Approximately 55 percent of households age 55-64 in America have less than $25,000 in retirement savings, including 41 percent who have zero. Most of the households in this age group have some other resources or benefits from a Defined Benefit plan, but 27 percent of this age group have neither retirement savings nor a Defined Benefit plan. For the 59 percent of households age 55-64 with some retirement savings, the GAO study estimates that the median amount saved is about $104,000. While about 15 percent of these households have retirement savings amounts over $500,000, 11 percent have retirement savings below $10,000 and 24 percent have savings of less than $25,000.
The conclusion to draw from this study is that millions of Americans will never be able to stop working, to enjoy a financially-worry free retirement, to have a nest-egg into their 80s, or even to eat nutritionally balanced meals in retirement because Wall Street’s megabanks that Jamie Dimon concocted with Sandy Weill have eaten America’s lunch – and its future. Occupy Wall Street was right: the megabanks got bailed out; Americans got sold out – and are still being sold out by the self-declared felonious megabanks who have found ever creative ways of siphoning off trillions from the pockets of the working class while paying back pennies on the dollar, courtesy of the revolving-door regulators and sycophants in Congress.
On June 18 of last year, the Senate held a hearing on one of the myriad of Wall Street’s wealth transfer schemes: high frequency trading. Senator Elizabeth Warren aptly described the scheme:
“High frequency trading reminds me a little of the scam in Office Space. You know, you take just a little bit of money from every trade in the hope that no one will complain. But taking a little bit of money from zillions of trades adds up to billions of dollars in profits for these high frequency traders and billions of dollars in losses for our retirement funds and our mutual funds and everybody else in the market place. It also means a tilt in the playing field for those who don’t have the information or have the access to the speed or big enough to play in this game.”
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