Wall Street's Meltdown: How America Caught Speculative Fever

"What we are witnessing," a front-page Washington Post analysis announced last week, "may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen."

The ongoing Wall Street meltdown is drawing all sorts of breathless historical comparisons. But few analysts seem to have noted an equally compelling historical coincidence: This "greatest destruction" of wealth we are now witnessing follows three decades of wealth's greatest concentration, years that have seen America's wealthy double their share of our nation's treasure.

Could these two phenomena somehow be related? And if they are, can a Wall Street bailout that ignores America's top-heavy distribution of income and wealth ever effectively restore real economic security back to average Americans?

This week, throughout the corridors of Congress, progressive activists will be working to expand the debate on the bailout that Wall Street's colossal collapse has made an urgent necessity. They'll be pressing lawmakers to target the top. They figure to find a much more receptive audience than they might have expected only weeks ago.

The staggering suddenness and size of Wall Street's meltdown has left many observers convinced that ever-escalating rewards for America's movers and shakers have become a significant contributor to everything that ails us economically.

Even conservative-leaning economists are bewailing the consequences of overgenerous compensation at the business summit. Huge "short-term rewards" for Wall Street's finest, as economist Robert Samuelson wrote last week, "blinded them to the long-term dangers" inherent in the hazardous risks they were taking -- with other people's money.

But decades of concentrating wealth have had consequences that go even deeper into the roots of the current Wall Street crisis. This concentrating served to inflate America's now-popped housing bubble. In metro areas throughout the United States, housing costs rose fastest in those areas where income and wealth had concentrated most intensely.

Asset bubbles like the housing speculative surge come naturally to extremely unequal societies. Inequality has always unleashed dynamics that make speculation inevitable. Where wealth tilts to the top, average people have less to spend. The wealthy, in turn, have less reason to plow their wealth into productive investment in the "real" economy, simply because average people can't afford to buy whatever that investment might produce.

But big wealth-holders have to do something with their dollars. They can, after all, only personally consume so much. So what happens with the dollars the wealthy cannot consume and cannot invest productively? The wealthy plow these dollars into speculation.

The concentration of wealth at the top, of course, doesn't just leave the wealthy with more wealth. They have more power, too, more clout in the political sphere. Over recent decades, America's wealthy have translated that power into electoral and lobbying blitzes that have swept away consumer- and homeowner-friendly government regulations.

U.S. mortgage lenders, freed from regulatory oversight, were able to misleadingly market high-interest subprime loans to millions of American families. Those families, for their part, had little choice but to sign on the dotted line. In a deeply unequal United States, with workers taking home a record low share of the nation's income, far fewer families could report enough income to qualify for a traditional mortgage.

In short, inequality cooked up the current Wall Street meltdown. Any serious attempt to end this meltdown -- and prevent another -- has to recognize inequality's role.

Progressive analysts and activists have begun peppering Capitol Hill with this message. They're advancing a wide range of proposals designed to make any bailout legislative package a springboard for a more equal United States.