If you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up.

A derivative is a bet on whether a stock, or a bond or a real estate asset, is going to go up or down. There's a winner and a loser. It's like betting on a horserace.

Nobody prefers to earn income any more, because that's taxable. Rich people prefer to make capital gains.

The other dynamic keeping the stock market up - both for technology stocks and others - is that companies are using a lot of their income for stock buybacks and to pay out higher dividends, not make new investment,. So to the extent that companies use financial engineering rather than industrial engineering to increase the price of their stock you're going to have a bubble. But it's not considered a bubble, because the government is behind it, and it hasn't burst yet.

If you have to pay about forty to forty-three percent of your income for housing, you also have to pay fifteen percent of your paycheck for the FICA for Social Security wage withholding. You have to pay medical care, you have to pay the banks for your credit card debt, student loans. Then you only have about twenty-five or thirty-five percent, maybe one-third of your salary to buy goods and services. That's all.

Governments create money and spend it into the economy by running budget deficits. The paper currency in your pocket is technically a government debt.

It's amazing that Europe says, "What are we going to do with these refugees?" It's as if it doesn't realize that being part of NATO and bombing these countries forces them to choose to live by fleeing, or to stay and get bombed.