Is America a plutonomy? – Salon.com
It’s dangerously unstable when 5 percent of American earners account for 35 percent of all consumer spending
By Michael Lind
Has the American economy turned into a "plutonomy"?
In 2005, three Citigroup analysts — Ajay Kapur, Niall MacLeod and Narendra Singh — answered yes. They explained: "Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S … Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time." According to the Citigroup experts, a plutonomic economy is driven by the consumption of the classes, not the masses: "In a plutonomy there is no such animal as ‘the U.S. consumer’ or ‘the UK consumer,’ or indeed the ‘Russian consumer.’ There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the ‘no-rich,’ the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie." The Citigroup analysts speculated that a plutonomic world economy could be driven by the spending of the world’s rich minority, whose ranks are "swelling from globalized enclaves in the emerging world."
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