It’s been a rough year for Wall Street.
It’s now in its fourth quarter.
And the stock market is down almost 30% year-to-date.
What can Wall Street do to stem the bleeding?
It turns out, it’s not a new strategy.
Over the past year, the S&P 500 has been climbing at a solid clip.
So far this year, it has topped 21,000.
The index is up almost 50% over that period.
In other words, stocks have been up by a lot.
And now, a group of analysts is pushing back.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the S.&.
500 has surged to an all-time high of 20,094.
This is an astonishing rally.
And it has been fueled by an increase in retail stocks.
But the biggest reason for the rise has been the rise in food, energy, and other commodities.
So how do you stop that growth?
It comes down to a couple of things.
First, we need to reduce the concentration of wealth.
There is a wealth gap in this economy.
The median household income is $48,200.
But in the richest one-fifth of households, it is $70,800.
The richest one percent have about $300,000 in assets, the WSJ reports.
The gap is getting worse.
And this is because the economy is doing pretty well.
The unemployment rate is at 6.9%.
That means that people who are working are not getting a lot of money.
So the inequality is growing, too.
So what can Wall St., as a group, do to make things better?
We can reduce the inequality in our economy by raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
And that would help the bottom 20% of households.
It would also be good for small businesses and the middle class, which is where most of the wealth is concentrated.
But more broadly, we can reduce inequality by raising wages.
The last thing we need is for wages to stagnate.
They need to rise.
And they need to do that now, because the economic recovery is coming.
But there are some steps that Wall St, as a whole, can take to help.
We can pass a minimum wage law that would put a dollar amount on minimum wages.
So a lot more workers would have to get up and pay the $15.
And, of course, we could pass a corporate tax cut that would cut corporate taxes by at least 10%.
And that could be good.
We could also raise the minimum price of a gallon of gas to $3.25.
And there are other things that could help.
And I think that is what is going to happen, in the next couple of years, in terms of economic growth.
But we have to do it now, before the market goes down, before it goes back up.
So if we can get a lot stronger growth in the near term, we will be able to hold our own against the next wave of global recession.
It is going be a tough year, but I think we will get through it.