The Incredible Shrinking Economy

Lots of things are going up in Canada. Wages are up 3% year over year. The population has grown by 1% over the last year. But one thing, one important thing, has shrunk: the GDP is down by 3.2%. Since population grew but the economy shrunk, that means the average person's piece of the pie has shrunk by more than 3.2%:



Sadly Mexico has been badly hit. It is down by 10.3%. It is hard to imagine taking a 10% cut in your standard of living. Especially when you are Mexico and the per capital income is $14,200 per person according to the CIA's World Factbook. That means your income on average dropped from $14,200 down to $12,800. That hurts.

What really, really bothers me is that this whole economic mess can be traced to greed by the very wealthy on Wall Street who bought politicians off to deregulate, who paid themselves extravagant salaries with "bonuses" to create fraudulent "securities" that they sold around the world to undermine the global economy. Now their greed has collapsed the system and we are all playing. Well, all of us "ordinary" folk. The greedy seem to have gotten away scot-free. No fines, no jail time, nothing.

Lots and lots of people are going to spend many, many years trying to rebuild their lives. Meanwhile those who did this great crime can sit quietly in their mansions and calmly count the loot they extracted from the system before they crashed it.