But, dear Dodo, that's everybody's plight! Have a look at the chart in Post #249034. It shows that the earnings of the top 0.1% tumbled from 700% in 2006 to just 400% two years later, while the top 1% saw their earnings shrink from 400% to just 250% over the same period time (with respect to 1976).

Just think how you would feel if, in 2006, you had been making 7 million a year and 2 years later just 4 million!

It would feel OK if the 4 million in 2008 would buy me what the 7 million in 2006 used to.

But matter is...

An excerpt from http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/corporate_criminals_gone_wild/:

“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary film on how government, Wall Street and academia colluded to deliver us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, made a powerful case that something was very very rotten at the heart of the American political/economic nexus. His follow-up book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America,” can be considered the legal brief that dots every “i” and crosses every “t” in his argument.

“Predator Nation” is an angry book. Were you this angry before you started making the film “Inside Job”?

No, I absolutely was not. I remember the first time I got any kind of inkling of what was to come was in August or September 2007, when Charley Morris sent me a copy of a galley proof of his book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.” It was scary and powerful, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I remember calling Charley and saying, “You lay out a very convincing case but really, these people aren’t that crazy, they aren’t that stupid. They are regulated. Can it really be this bad?”

And he said: “You just wait.” And boy, he was right.

It’s not that I thought that investment bankers were like Mother Teresa. I knew that they weren’t. But the degree of nakedness and extremity of the dishonesty and its pervasiveness was a huge shock to me. It turned out that many banks, on a very large scale, and without any disclosure, had created and sold securities with the intent of betting on their failure. And this was done with the knowledge and approval of senior management of all these banks, including the oldest and most traditional.

How do you explain this behavior? How did we get to a point where it was routine for Wall Street bankers to behave in ways that most Americans would consider frankly immoral? 

I think this has its roots all the way back in the 1970s and the beginning of the era of deregulation. But there was a kind of inflection point during the five-year period between 1997 and 2003 — the late Clinton and/or early Bush administration — when all the rules just went away. You went from a period, a regime, where people did have at least some concern about going to jail, to a point where everything is legal, and derivatives couldn’t be regulated at all and nobody went to jail for anything. And looking back I would say that this period definitely started under Clinton. You absolutely cannot blame this on George W. Bush.

You say that everything is now legal, but in your book you dismiss Obama’s argument that he could not prosecute Wall Street bankers for criminal behavior because what they did was technically not illegal as “complete horseshit.” ...

I have blogged about this before, but one big aspect to the crisis was the end of relationship banking, where people knew their banker, to what they call "arms-length banking". Let's face it, you are not going to screw over some guy you see at the golf course every Saturday, but you might be ok with screwing over some guy in Thailand or Austria, who you don't know. 

Also, I disagree that de-regulation is to blame. I think that the laws on how much capital banks have to maintain at all times is the biggest factor. 

Japan had an extremely regulated financial sector in 1990 when it had its banking crisis. I think that the notion that bureaucrats will stop the excesses, is a bit naive. 

The bad news: Russia Pleased With Current Oil Price

The good news: No empire or monopolist will last forever.

Thanks to its new shale gas production, the United States has lost the title of "gas importer" and become a "gas exporter" A new report prepared by Sberbank Lead Economist Kseniya Yudayeva suggests that by 2016 Gazprom will lose a significant share of its European market and prices will drop because of shale gas.

In the last ten years, the U.S.A. has been able to develop and produce shale gas very quickly, and will “drown the world with gas” with the sale of liquefied shale gas. As a result, European countries will no longer need to purchase expensive gas from Russia.
Currently Gazprom holds 27% of the European market. However they will not be able to maintain high prices as shale gas production continues. Gazprom cannot compete with shale gas, arguing that the cost is too high. However some experts warn Gazprom that the share of shale gas in the market has gone from zero to 29% in just 10 years, and that they should continue on with liquid gas production. http://gazday.com/

I read that North Dakota's supply of oil and gas is now 4 times higher than in 1990. And their unemployment rate is about 3 %. 

I wrote about why I think the US will still be the nr. 1 economy in 2050 here: www.econtranslator.com.