Pimm Fox - Mind the K, Man

When the top 10% sneeze, the rest of us catch a foreclosure. And don’t call me Shirley.

So, like, here’s the deal, dude.

The economy is K-shaped.

Not V-shaped, not U-shaped, not even L-shaped.

It’s a K.

Like the letter.

One line pointing up for the rich folks, one line pointing down for everybody else. You don’t need to be Alan Greenspan to figure out which line you’re on.

If you’re sipping cocktails in Aspen and driving a Tesla Plaid, congrats — you’re on the upstroke.

If you’re eating gas-station burritos and arguing with your landlord about why your rent costs more than the GDP of Portugal, you’re on the downstroke.

Mark Zandi — he’s a smart economist at Moody’s Analytics — says the top 20% are “driving the economic train.”

Yeah, and the rest of us are tied to the tracks like in a silent movie.

As of June, the top 20% of earners (making $264,500 a year) account for 63% of all spending.

The top 10% (the ones making more than $353,000) cough up nearly half.

So basically, if the rich stop buying fancy cheese and jet skis, the whole economy keels over.

That’s not capitalism, man. That’s dependency with Gucci suspenders.

Surely the economy can’t depend on so few people.

“Yes, it can. And don’t call me Shirley.”

In 2019, the top 10% accounted for 44% of spending. Now it’s 49%. That’s historic.

Which is a polite economist way of saying, “Oh crap.”

The gap’s widening faster than a Kardashian’s Instagram filter.

The economy is like a rug. It ties everything together.

But then some guys come in, pours a White Russian on it, and tells us it was modern art.

Now we’re just sitting here in bowling shoes, trying to pay rent with coupons.

The whole setup is insane.

An economy that relies on a sliver of people buying stuff is like a plane held up by one wing.

So what happens if the stock market hiccups? Boom — recession. We all go down the K’s bottom line while the top still tries to ski uphill.

Here’s the thing: if your “economic train” only runs when the top 20% feel like shopping, then everybody else isn’t even a passenger.

We’re ballast.

And I don’t know about you, but being ballast on someone else’s train isn’t the American Dream. It’s more like the American gag reel.