Paris – Suddenly, it has turned very cold in Paris.

The sky is gray. People wear coats and scarves. It almost feels as though it could snow.

Seeing the weather turn against us, we wonder what else might be coming.

A chilly Paris, as seen from our balcony

As we predicted, the Dow fell back below 17,000 yesterday, after Walmart warned that it was having trouble selling things to people with no money – at least online.

Its e-commerce efforts don’t seem to be paying off as quickly as it hoped.

Why?

There are about 100 million people in the U.S. who earn about the same average wage as the people of Argentina, Estonia, or Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Here’s President Reagan’s former budget advisor David Stockman in the Daily Reckoning:

 [A]ccording to the Social Security Administration’s wage records, there were 100 million workers who held any kind of paying job during 2013, who earned a collective total of just $1.65 trillion that year.That amounts to the incredibly small sum of just $16,500 per average worker. And not for a small slice of the labor force but fully two-thirds of all Americans with a job.  

A Dismal Share

And according to our old friend Jim Davidson, the U.S. now has wealth inequality rivaled only by Russia.

There are a few people at the top earning a lot of money. And there are a lot at the bottom earning little money.

Jim elaborates in his soon-to-be-released book, tentatively titledThe Breaking Point:

 Evidence of how far the bottom 50% of America’s wealth distribution has fallen comes from Credit Suisse in its 2014 Global Wealth Report.As interpreted by Mike Krieger, the data show that the bottom half of America’s wealth distribution ranks dead last among 40 major economies, with “just 1.3% of national wealth. Only Russia comes close to that dismal share, at 1.9%.”  

At the Diary, how much other people earn is none of our business. And we have no truck with those who urge the feds to “do something” – by which they mean take away money from rich Peter and give it to poor Paul.