Our ENTIRE Economy Is Trapped Inside Retirement Accounts

追加: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]The markets experiencing a historic run.

[00:00:02]The S&P 500s posted eight consecutive weekly gains, the longest streak since 2023. Jarvis, uh, pull up stock market activity and gains right before the Great Depression.

[00:00:14]Look at the global market cap of all companies since the bottom of the Iran war. It's up 14%. No, no, yeah. Yeah.

[00:00:19]No, it's it's it's remarkable. It really is. Look at this. Just since uh mid 2023, the total volume of wealth held in the uh uh the global market cap has almost doubled.

[00:00:34]Total market cap of all companies listed on companies market cap. Well, we'll assume that encompasses most companies.

[00:00:40]And remember, all the money that you see here in some way or another represents money that's not uh widely circulating.

[00:00:47]It's not quite that simple. It's not a zero- sum game, but as I'm fond of saying, it's not an infinity someum game either. This is partially from more companies being listed. When Space X gets listed, when they drop their IPO, this shit's going to look like a [ __ ] It's just going to be a vertical lineup here, man. It's going to be crazy. Did you see how the NASDAQ changed its listing rules right before the SpaceX IPO to get it listed on the NASDAQ 100 as quickly as possible so 401ks can get dumped into it? Yep. Whether you like it or not, your retirement account is going to get dumped into SpaceX. your your ability to retire comfortably, you know, 40 years from now will be determined almost entirely by Elon Musk's Twitter posts. So, have fun with that, dog. I'm literally never retiring. Yeah, well, you know, all young people like to say that. Out of curiosity, can you see what the US economy looks like minus speculation value? That's really tough.

[00:01:35]Um, you can take a look at total money supplies like M1, M2, and try to like parse those out, but even that doesn't tell us exactly what we want. You can take a look at like um uh share of wealth as is as as labor through wages like uh hold on share of wealth as wages USA. Is that the term I'm looking for? I might be uh labor share of income. That's what I'm looking for. Labor share of income. The percentage of total economic output that goes to workers wages and benefits is 54.1% which is the lowest recorded value since they started tracking the data in 1947. But even this doesn't give us a perfect picture because it also shows you benefits which means in a lot of cases retirement savings which means it's in the stock market. So even this is distorted. Um but share of labor compensation as a percentage of GDP is still a good way of looking at things.

[00:02:29]You can see it's dipped precipitously since co unsurprisingly during this period of time from co to now the stock market has seen its greatest gains ever not just in total value but as a percentage of its previous value. So you know you can do the math if you want but as I said even this doesn't perfectly fix it. Yes stock buybacks made this problem much worse as well. Yeah, for sure. Because it meant that corporate money could be reinvested into its own evaluation rather. We don't have to do this thing again.

[00:03:02]But you're correct. All companies do now is inflate the value of their own damn stock rather than paying out their workers or investing in R&D or whatever.

[00:03:09]There's no point in it's it's all rentseeking. Nobody wants to build or buy or develop anything anymore.

[00:03:14]Everyone the the economy in a real sense is fine exactly where it is. It's all about tightening the screws to up the margins on how much money you make from things as they are right now. The only other thing I'd add is speculative real estate value. Well, everyone knows the housing market's [ __ ] It's just worth keeping in mind that it's [ __ ] even outside the housing market. National rent freeze. That's not a real thing.

[00:03:35]You're just saying words. That cannot happen and will never happen. It wouldn't solve anything. It would break the economy. It's not real. You're just saying words.

[00:03:42]Yes.

[00:03:46]It's even more striking if you look at non-farm business sector. No, labor share for all workers. Oh, this is a different measurement. Labor share for all workers from 115 down to 95 non-farm labor share for am I am I misunderstanding what this refers to quarterly all workers?

[00:04:07]I'm not sure if I understand what this refers to. I'll look at it later. No need for me to bother you all with that right now.

[00:04:15]How do you see the crash playing out?

[00:04:16]Will it be like08? I don't know. You're not Dave Rubin and me, [ __ ] Who knows?

[00:04:24]Who knows?

[00:04:30]Estimating US labor.

[00:04:36]Math. Math. Math. Math. Math. Math. Show me the chart. Show me the charts. Yeah.

[00:04:42]Labor shares output non-farm business sector first quarter of 1947 through third quarter 2016 just look at what Dave Rubin says and say the opposite h related to capital or profit share part of income going to capital but it's not it's not right because a lot of the labor share or wage share also goes to capital no even even these descriptors are slighted to favor the interests of capital.

[00:05:12]You could theoretically skyrocket labor share just by putting out more money through like 401ks, which still go back into the damn stock market. That shit's still pumping up SpaceX. This is a good article about financialization. Nice try. I can't I can't read. First sentence of definition, wage share over gross GDP. What do you I know we read that. What do you mean? Compensation of employees disclosure national accounts balance of payments from corporate accounts. Well, total t total gross pre-tax wages paid by employers to employees for count year. However, in reality, the aggregate includes more than just gross wages at least in national accounts and balance of payment statistics. The reason that in these accounts CE is defined as the total renumeration in cash or in kind payable by an enterprise to an employee in return for work done by the latter during the accounting period. It effectively represents the total labor cost to an employer paid for the gross revenues of the capital or an enterprise. Compensation of employees is accounted for on an acrruel basis i.e. It's measured by the value of the renumer remuneration remuneration in cash or in kind which an employee becomes a title receive from employer contrast with other inputs production which are valued to the point where they're actually used different countries what's included in C might differ somewhat wage work compensated so does the um does the Fred explicitly state what they're counting for in the share of labor compensation here. For more information, see this.

[00:06:40]Great. Interesting.

[00:06:45]You said the Fred. The Fred right here.

[00:06:48]The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which publishes this data. I didn't say the Fed. I said the Fred right here.

[00:06:53]See, for once, I'm not misspeaking.

[00:06:57]Damn page ain't loading, though. What?

[00:06:59]What am I even looking at? University of Grunt. What?

[00:07:04]Look at this later. All right. National prices. Share of gross domestic income.

[00:07:09]Compensation of employees paid. Wages and salary acrals. Dispersements to persons. Dispersements. Can I get a definition for dispersement? Man, look at that sharp decline. Jesus Christ.

[00:07:19]Like look at how consistent it is.

[00:07:22]Dispersements are bonuses and benefits.

[00:07:23]Yeah. Which would include, I assume, retirement accounts. No. Percent of US GDP. Not GDP. Wealth pool.

[00:07:34]Retirement accounts make up a very very very very significant portion of um the total amount of wealth in the United States. Total US retirement account assets were you guys want to take a guess? 49.1 trillion in late 2025 which represents approximately 170% of the US GDP.

[00:07:56]Of course, this [ __ ] gets invested in the stock market, which means that if we're taking a look at shares of gross domestic income, whether or not we're including retirement accounts makes a massive difference in what this is.

[00:08:09]Like, it's very possible that this decline would be much much much sharper.

[00:08:13]Like, both the the the slope and the y intercept uh would be much sharper downward if we weren't including anything that gets automatically invested in the stock market. These pension and retirement savings holdings make up about 34% of all household financial assets nationwide. Even though only about 54% of American households actually hold dedicated retirement accounts. Ooh, all that wealth and only half of American households actually get it.

[00:08:43]Look at this. Pension fund assets to GDP for the United States. So as you can see between 2002 and 2020 the pension fund asset to GDP ratio has increased by three times it has tripled which means that again we're taking a look at skewed statistics. It says that the uh share of gross domestic labor as GDP has decreased as such. But if we account for the fact that a significant amount of the dispersements that account for that labor share are going into retirement accounts which get reinvested in the stock market, you're actually looking at a very very very low amount of money in the American economy that's actually um circulating freely.

[00:09:25]Retirement accounts aren't liquid after all. You're not like dispersing this wealth freely.

[00:09:33]40% of the stock markets from the retirement accounts. That's why they invest them in the stock market to bolster the amount of money that the, you know, to the the capital class gets.

[00:09:41]You're not making crazy day trades.

[00:09:43]You're not insider trading with your [ __ ] retirement holdings. But they are the hedge funds that they're making these trades to are leveraging your money. Your wealth is going into it so that their shares are worth more. they get to make bigger better trades because uh the the the whole stock market is being uh you know buffered up with the uh retirement accounts.

[00:10:06]It's like it's an almost perfect inverse measurement of um of uh of the um the velocity of wealth, isn't it? How much of our GDP is held up in retirement accounts? I mean, good lord, look at this.

[00:10:20]170% of the US GDP as of 2020 held up in retirement accounts. That's ridiculous.

[00:10:25]None of that money is circulating.

[00:10:28]49.1 trillion just sitting in retirement accounts.

[00:10:33]Oh, earlier when I said uh Donald Trump isn't causing the problem, he's only exacerbating it. This is the problem that I'm referring to. Uh over financialization/ low velocity of money. This is exactly what I mean. All of this was happening under Obama. Trump won. Biden would have happened under Kamla. This trend continues upwards. It's continuing. It's not stopping. Trump wouldn't stop it. He couldn't stop it. No one can stop it.

[00:10:58]Precisely what I mean. The M1 velocity of money chart is apocalyptic.

[00:11:04]Yeah. Part of it is um is because they changed the definition in uh in in 2020, but uh yeah, it's not it's not great velocity of the M1 money stock. Look at what 2008 did. Look at what quantitative easing did. Oh no.

[00:11:23]Part of it is because they changed the definition which sort of muddles the data a little bit, but we're still looking at like, you know, a very bad QE didn't do that. It contributed.

[00:11:35]Retirement accounts are equal to 170% of the GDP. Does that mean there's more money in retirement accounts than the Americ's national debt? Yes. America's national debt is about 100% of the GDP right now.

[00:11:46]If I recall correctly, they added savings accounts in the M1 money supply when they were originally counted M2, which is stupid because M1 should not include savings accounts. It just shouldn't. It shouldn't. It shouldn't account. It shouldn't include them.

[00:11:59]Savings accounts do not have the same degree of liquidity as the other accounts measured in M1.

[00:12:05]They did that because the Fed removed the six per month withdrawal limit, making savings deposits virtually as liquid as checking deposits. and in so doing further muddled our ability to determine like the velocity of money in in the in the current economy. Now savings accounts basically don't mean anything. You know, the only savings accounts that actually operate the way old savings accounts did are the high yield savings accounts that you can't pull money out from immediately. So like that's a whole different Yeah. savings accounts barely generate interest anymore. So it's like might as well just hold it in savings and treat it like a checking account. It's just The post2020 data not being comparable is frustrating because of the comical situation the capitalists are in right now. Elon went from around 150 billion net worth in 2020 to 800 billion today.

[00:12:50]We're living in the same period. Yeah.

[00:12:52]Yeah. We're like individuals some individuals possess wealth significant enough to make a dent in the global debt. I mean like like it's so it's so unequal.

[00:13:04]He'll be a trillionaire soon. Maybe just in a couple of years. It's possible that the SpaceX IPO on its own will make him a trillionaire, the world's first trillionaire. As I've said before, of course, none of this has anything to do with Trump. All of this is just a consequence of financialization.

[00:13:21]The, you know, factors influencing these changes have been set in motion. You know, they they they have been decades ago. They're continuing to be reinforced. It's just, you know, you get me. What the [ __ ] Because companies don't really do anything. Companies don't have to do anything to make money anymore. That's you're thinking you're you're you're left in the past, boomer. Oh, grandpa.

[00:13:43]You think companies make money by selling products and services? What are you a [ __ ] idiot? Holy [ __ ] Get with the times. Nobody makes money that way anymore. Clinton had a balanced budget, [ __ ] We're not talking about budget balancing right now. What are you? Are you a bot? I don't understand the liberals in chat who don't, man. You if you are I'm being serious. If you are intellectually c okay I'm let me just I'm going to lay this out to you okay the the gift of Apollo has been tossed directly at my head it's bounced off it's left the well listen to me okay the world is going to keep getting worse over the course of your lifetime some ways in your personal life it may improve maybe you get your life together you stop doing drugs or whatever you stop bothering streamers when they're making a good point you improve your life but the world at large will get worse in many ways and you'll wonder why I'm telling you why now if you are at all intellectually curious about why this trend seems to continue getting worse throughout your lifetime why Is this bleak this p of uh of of despair these storm clouds brewing consistently whether or not the news of the day changes? Why are we observing a set of continuing uh trends through uh uh uh Clinton and Bush regardless of whether the you know the deficit is being paid off or whatever else whatever we have a you know net deficit of zero or a positive uh cash flow for the United States government. It's because that's not the nature of the problem. The nature is fundamental. It is a problem in capitalism. This is you you you would call it, you know, sort of a dialectical resolution. The problem is that the external pressures to this dialectic, most notably the Soviet Union no longer exist. And in the absence of an opposing force, the uh inequities and the inefficiencies and the irrationalities of this system have been allowed to metastasize to an almost apocalyptic degree. You know, it's like, how do I put this? uh without the ground to stop you, you accelerate to terminal velocity. You know, there's nothing dangerous about the speed itself, only the acceleration or deceleration.

[00:15:38]Without the comfort of the ground beneath your feet, you have been accelerating, we have been accelerating towards the ground, but eventually we will meet the new ground. Balancing the budget is a a tangential issue.

[00:15:54]Wealth of billionaires versus bottom 50% since 1990s. Not going to lie, financialization plus the climate crisis. to rob me of hope. Well, that's okay. You know, it'll uh I don't have a I don't have a way to finish this.

[00:16:06]Sorry. My bad.

[00:16:13]Velocity of M2 money stock as well. M1 and M2. Of course, the ratio for M2 is much lower because we're including a a much wider range of accounts to settle for the money stock. But still, man, I really wish they hadn't changed that definition back in uh in 2020. This makes it so much harder to get a clean read on the data. Still a ratio dropping from 1.8 to um to 1.4.

[00:16:38]Can't you just move the line up? That'd be nice. AI capex um is expected to hit 4 trillion in 24 months. 24 months. You think this bubble is going to keep going for another two years? I mean, maybe.

[00:16:51]Maybe.

[00:16:53]like it's not impossible, but even rich investor consumer sentiment is bad. They see the storm clouds brewing as well. Most Americans, I'd say probably 99% of Americans, even the wealthy ones, even the ones who otherwise know what they're doing, don't know why the end is coming, but they still can sense it. You know, in the same way that animals can instinctually sense the coming of a storm or fishermen or whatever, um they understand, they can feel it. I still believe this decline in money velocity comes from declining birth rates and not from a nebulous financialization problem.

[00:17:28]Several problems with your assertion.

[00:17:29]For one, declining birth rates would still contribute to a disproportionate amount of money being held in the assets of the older people, the retirement accounts, which still contributes to a financialization problem on its own because that wealth is invested in the stock market. So like even if it's contributed to in part by the declining birth rate, that's still a factor. Like that's not that doesn't invalidate it.

[00:17:48]It's just a contributing factor. It's an explanatory variable, not like a a null one. And also, the financialization problem is not even remotely nebulous.

[00:17:56]You betray your total inexperience with economic issues. Economists have been raising red flags about the financialization of the economy for decades. Seriously, just go read the Financial Times. People are talking about it, you know, not just lefties, liberal economists, you know, people who only care about making money. It's not nebulous. It's a real thing. It's just that nobody talks about it because nobody It's like the fish don't talk about water. You know, they cannot imagine a world outside of this.

[00:18:26]Even with my creative imagination, I'm afraid I don't see a way out for us. Not without a lot of pain.

[00:18:33]Bond yields are reaching 2008 levels.

[00:18:36]Nebulous financialization problem. My ass. Nebulous. Look at this. Jesus Christ. Of course, fish don't talk about water. I can't speak. You got me.

[00:18:48]Yeah. Me. Me when the problem is nebulous. Yeah. Yeah. I think the most striking statistic in all of this is the fact that a hundred that the the total value of retirement accounts is like 170% of the um of the GDP.