Obama’s trickle-down economics

And banks aren’t the only ones profiting from Bernanke’s money creation bonanza. Stocks are up too. As Bernanke himself testified to Congress, “This effect is potentially important because stock values affect both consumption and investment decisions.”

Which is great news … if you own stocks. And guess who does? The rich. The wealthiest 5 percent of Americans own 82 percent of all individually held stocks. So whatever wealth effects Bernanke has created for the rich won’t be felt by the rest of us until they … trickle down.

The Fed has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars a month into the U.S. economy for four years now. Four years that have also witnessed the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. Four years in which, according to University of California, Berkeley, economist Emmanuel Saez, inequality has not only grown, it has grown faster than it did under President George W. Bush.