Financial, Economic and Social Mood Update (July 1, 2018)
Financial, Economic and Social Mood Update (July 1, 2018) The US stock market peaked on January 26, 2018 with the Dow Jones 30 Industrials Index reaching 26,617 on that date. The market dropped 3,272 points by April 2, 2018 which was a loss of 12.3 percent of its wealth. Its value on Friday June 29 was no less than 24,302 – just 8.7 percent off its record high. The American economy and the global economy are relatively robust. 44 percent of the human population on earth belongs to the upper or to the middle class. Part of the global lower class is not what one would term destitute – 34 percent of the globe belongs to the “working” lower class. The bottom 22 percent of the human global population is still largely destitute, being either homeless or in lack of “adequate” shelter. June’s topic largely dealt with imploding (or collapsing) global human population demographics. Much more remains to be said on this monumental problem – which will be discussed at more length in future monthly updates. Gargantuan changes are awaiting us on the economic and financial fronts as well. Populist political trends are putting an immense amount of pressure upon the post-World War 2 European experiment – the European Union or EU. The dream for the current EU was born shortly before the end of the Second World War, when the exiled governments of the Low Countries (the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) met in London in 1944. Adolf Hitler’s attempt to unite and rule Europe by the force of German arms would end in the rubble of Germany’s great capital city of Berlin in May 1945. Hitler’s Germany & its extreme right-wing politics were a very severe “reaction” to what had happened after the disaster of the “Great War” of…