The Greatest (Legal) Transfer of Wealth in American History
By Eric Wade and Mike Palmer
The Greatest (Legal) Transfer of Wealth in American History
The gap between the rich and the poor has always existed in America.
But never, ever, on this level. And never with this speed.
Every day, thousands and thousands of Americans are ascending into an entirely new level of wealth – something even beyond what millionaires could afford a decade ago. And instead of plateauing, these changes are continuing to power this new class higher… turning millionaires into billionaires.
But why is this happening?
And what’s coming next?
That’s why we put together this report…
AMERICA’S HUGE WEALTH
SHIFT, EXPLAINED…
In short, what’s happening all over America, is something we often refer to as: “The Transition.”
Amazon has taken over retail.
Uber has taken over cabs.
Apple and Spotify have taken over music.
Netflix has taken over movies and TV.
Google has taken over data.
LinkedIn and others have taken over job search and hiring.
Expedia and TripAdvisor have taken over the travel industry.
The list goes on and on.
In short, for many years now, we have been transitioning from the industrial age… to the computer age.
We have moved from a paper-based analog world… to a digital society.
For some, the transition has been devastating…
Blockbuster, for example, was doing $6 billion in annual revenue in 2004… But by 2010, it had declared bankruptcy. Look at this incredible chart…
As Uber soared to a billion-dollar valuation, the old taxi industry was devastated. Look at this chart that shows how ride-hailing app usage has soared while the monthly NYC taxi pickups have plummeted…
As Amazon and others have moved so much of our shopping online, traditional retail operations are being devastated, one after the other…
In 2019 alone, an estimated 9,000+ retail stores closed.
You’re probably familiar with closings at places like Sears, JC Penney, Kmart, Best Buy, and Macy’s. But did you know 390 Family Dollar stores will close … 650 Dressbarn stores will close… and 2,100 Payless ShoeSource stores will close?
CNBC reported recently that more than 15,000 retail stores could close in 2020, because of this accelerating trend and the coronavirus.
Thousands and thousands of people are losing their jobs as a result.
Investment bank UBS estimates another 75,000 retail stores across America could be lost by 2026.
Meanwhile, those who have capitalized on this digital trend already have seen outstanding profits.
A $100 investment in the early days of Amazon (which we first recommended our subscribers buy back in 1999) would now be worth more than $130,000. The same amount in Apple would now be worth more than $45,000. In Netflix, $34,000.
Personal wealth has shifted dramatically, too…
Jeff Bezos is now much richer than Warren Buffett. The “cloud computing” software kings at Salesforce just built the tallest building west of the Mississippi. The hottest real estate market in America is now, get this: the Seattle suburb of Tacoma, Washington.
Why?
Because the previous hottest real estate market, Seattle – home to digital companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Tableau, and Expedia – became unaffordable to all but the very wealthy.
When you look at the 10 richest Americans according to a recent full-year ranking, this shift becomes obvious…
- Jeff Bezos
- Bill Gates
- Warren Buffett
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Larry Ellison
- Larry Page
- Charles Koch
- David Koch
- Sergey Brin
- Michael Bloomberg
Only Warren Buffett and the Koch brothers made their fortunes outside of this shift from an analog world to a digital society.
We call this new class of digital millionaires and billionaires the “Digerati.”
Today, we want to introduce you to this world because something big… really big… is coming next.
And the truth is, while those who understand this trend are getting rich, those who don’t (which includes the vast majority of Americans) are getting left far, far behind.
Consider this simple example of what’s about to come. It's only the tip of the iceberg, but it's easy for everyone to understand, And as a result, it has been widely reported on in the mainstream press…
3 MILLION MORE AMERICANS
WILL SOON BE OUT OF WORK?
Did you know that there are about 3.5 million truck drivers in America today… and that driving a truck is the most common job in more than half of U.S. states (29 in all)?
Today, the technology to completely replace 90% or more of these jobs is already available.
Self-driving trucks started making successful deliveries in Nevada as early as 2015. The mining company Rio Tinto has 73 autonomous trucks hauling iron ore 24 hours a day in Australia. The U.S. Postal Service started testing self-driving trucks on a 1,000-mile mail run between Phoenix and Dallas in 2019.
In August 2019, Wired Magazine ran a story titled: “Self-Driving Trucks are Ready to Do Business in Texas.”
Now look… rolling out all these self-driving trucks will take time, maybe three to five years or more. But self-driving trucks will be here way before self-driving cars because highway driving is 90% of what truckers do, and the economic incentives for self-driving trucks is enormous.
But think about what will happen to our country when 3.5 million hard-working, middle class truckers (who can earn up to $100k per year or more) are suddenly out of work… or see their wages collapse because highly skilled drivers are no longer needed?
These families are the economic foundation of thousands of small, rural communities – they're the heart of America.
What will happen when they lose hope?
When they see that by killing their jobs, Uber, Google, or trucking companies are able to reap billions of dollars in extra profit – sucking every penny out of America's heartland and pouring it into still more expensive housing in places like Seattle and San Francisco...?
That's how the lights are going out... and that's just the start of how this wealth shift is going to get worse.
You see, this massive shift from an analog to a digital society has two critical consequences, which are causing the gap between the rich and poor to widen, like never before…
No. 1. Making Money Faster Than Ever Before
First, it means that today, it takes less time than ever before to generate massive wealth.
Over the past few decades, for example, it took, on average, about 20 years for the typical Fortune 500 company to reach a market capitalization of $1 billion.
Then, Google – founded in 1998 – reached a $1 billion in market cap in just eight years. This was considered incredible and nearly impossible at the time.
But this rate of growth and mass adoption is accelerating.
Founded in 2004, Facebook became a billion-dollar company in just five years.
Founded in 2009, Uber became a billion-dollar firm in just three years.
And founded in 2012, virtual reality firm Oculus did it in under two years.
The chart below shows the amount of time it took for companies to hit a billion-dollar market cap.
As you can see, it’s taking less and less time to generate incredible wealth. New companies and new technologies can scale faster than ever before (making some people rich, more quickly, than ever before).
In just the past three years, more than 120 technology companies have returned 100% gains or more to investors.
So the time it takes for people to accumulate massive wealth is getting “compressed.”
Did you know, for example, that Barron’s estimates the number of millionaires created by bitcoin (the Internet’s new type of digital money), is somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000?
And it all happened in just a few short years.
Uber started in an apartment in 2009. Within just seven years, it was booking more rides than the entire U.S. taxi industry.
Think about that…
The whole thing happened in just seven years… starting in an apartment building.
Never before in human history has a technology created more wealth, more quickly, than this.
But there’s a flipside to this equation…
Increasing technological power and adoption also means companies can collapse faster than ever, too.
As Apple’s iPhone dominated the smartphone market, the losing competitor (Blackberry) saw its share price plummet more than 90% in five years.
Remember, we said this move to a digital society has caused two critical changes in our economy.
It enables companies to grow faster than ever.
But it also explains what is becoming a huge problem in our society…
No. 2. More Money, Concentrated in Fewer Hands
2020 Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang made headlines when he pointed out the top 1% of the U.S. population accrued 52% of the real income growth in America since 2009.
But why is this happening?
The answer is simple and obvious to anyone who understands technology.
Today, the acceleration of our technological advances allows companies to operate with just a fraction of the number of employees they used to require.
In other words, wealth is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
Just consider these incredible numbers…
Back in 1964, AT&T had more than 750,000 employees…
But in 2017, Google was a bigger and far richer company than AT&T with 92% fewer employees sharing the wealth.
Or look at the old school company, Hilton Hotels…
It has about 170,000 employees… which helped generate about $9 billion in revenue last year. That’s about $53,000 per employee.
But tech upstart Airbnb generates 5-times more money per employee than Hilton. Soon, Airbnb will be making more money in total than Hilton Hotels… but will most likely do it with a 90%+ reduction in labor.
In 2012, IBM had more than 400,000 employees… Today, Microsoft has 66% fewer employees than IBM and makes about $50 billion more per year.
Plus, people who invested in Microsoft back in 2000 made about 10 times more in gains than those who invested in IBM.
Back in 1989, Kodak had about 145,000 employees… Today, Snap (the company behind the popular multimedia messaging app, Snapchat) has just 1,800 employees.
You get the point…
The best new companies of today simply don’t need many employees compared with companies from a decade or two ago. So the number of great jobs is decreasing, while the pay for these employees is radically soaring.
This is why the wealth gap gets wider and wider every single year.
Again, businesses are making money faster than ever… and it’s being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
This is happening everywhere, in every industry…
Even in “boring” industries like banking…
You’ve probably never heard of a company called Annaly Capital Management.
It has just 170 employees and has used innovative technologies in modern finance to generate about $13 million in revenue per employee.
That means Annaly generates about 25 times as much money per employee as Bank of America.
But again, most Americans are completely missing out on how this is all unfolding.
And that's not even the most important change that's happening.
Here’s the Biggest Technological Change, Coming Next…
There's no question that GPS, 5G wireless, LIDAR technology, self-driving cars and trucks, robotics for warehouses and manufacturing, artificial intelligence ("AI") to replace human interactions, and other innovations will soon put millions and millions of truckers out of work.
And as those lights go out, the consequences to America's political union will be perilous.
You see, these are all "normal" innovations. They're the result of engineers getting more out of technology that's been around for a long time.
GPS, for example, was first used by the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1970s and was available for civilian use in the 1980s. Professors at Dartmouth were developing AI computer programs as far back as the late 1950s.
Today, these technologies are commonplace in our society.
Self-driving capabilities will have a massive impact on truckers (and car manufacturers and taxis, just to name a few). Robotics will destroy millions of manufacturing jobs. And AI will eliminate the need for millions of customer service jobs.
But all of these changes are relatively minor compared to the "Tidal Wave" that's coming…
That’s because there's an entire new technology that's about to change everything.
And this breakthrough has nothing to do with the “hot” new technologies the mainstream media is obsessed with these days, like electric cars, artificial intelligence, 5G, or robotics.
It’s actually much, much bigger.
It’s the next huge leap forward for the Digerati… the people who have been getting rich while most Americans are left far behind…
WHY WE WILL NEVER
FORGET OCTOBER 31…
Throughout history, there have always been periods in time when new innovations changed everything about how human societies functioned.
For example, it's not commonly appreciated, but the invention of the gin mill (an engine applied to farming) radically altered not only the textile industry, but also led directly to the eradication of slavery because it made labor vastly more efficient.
This one innovation created massive amounts of wealth – but it also set the American South on the path to war. Humanity, morality, and civil liberty gained enormously, but many, many people were left behind in the American South, where deep poverty remains even to this day.
Or consider what's happened since the invention of the integrated circuit (microchip) and transistors around 1950...
Very few people realized how transistors and the ability to combine electricity with logic gates would empower computing in ways no one could have even begun to imagine.
But it's likely you didn't capitalize on the biggest creation of wealth so far in human history that early on… unless you understood that the speed, capability, and affordability of computers would double every couple years (commonly known as Moore's Law) – and could see how vastly more powerful and cheaper computers were going to change everything in the modern economy.
Even Warren Buffett – the best investor who ever lived (and Bill Gates’ best friend) – never bought Microsoft because he never really understood how Moore's Law would impact the software industry and enable Microsoft's massive, almost unbelievable ascent.
Most people don’t remember this, but in the late 1990s, Microsoft grew so wealthy, powerful, and dominant that the U.S. government intervened to break up the firm. Without the government’s intervention, many argue Google would not even exist today.
That’s the type of power and wealth that major technological breakthroughs can generate.
You see, there are these seminal moments in history...
Like when Einstein published his Theory of Relativity... or when Genentech first used genetic engineering to produce human insulin with bacteria... or when Claude Shannon wrote The Mathematical Theory of Communication (which launched the modern optical networking revolution)... that truly change everything.
But, unfortunately, most people never understand what's happening… until it’s too late.
They don't see or understand the hidden forces that are growing, just under the surface... which, like a tidal wave, are going to completely overwhelm everything that stands in their way.
One of those moments occurred on October 31, 2008.
You probably remember that period in time…
There was a global financial crisis and Americans were defaulting on almost 20% of the mortgages in the country.
But... in another 20 or 30 years... that financial crisis will be completely forgotten.
We know that probably sounds hard to believe today. But the truth is, that period of time will forever be known as the moment when a new technology emerged that changed absolutely everything about the way money, banking, commerce, and property rights are managed.
You see, on October 31, 2008, an anonymous computer scientist laid out, in precise detail, a new method of linking the power of computers and fiber optic networks to money. He created a currency that will gain in value in direct relation to the power of computing, globally.
And everything – absolutely everything – is going to change as a result.
If you think technology is leaving most Americans behind now, what's coming next should terrify you. Eric created a video explaining what is happening. To view it, click here.
The group we call the Digerati (the huge network of Americans who have been developing new technologies for decades and growing ever richer as a result)… has built its own currency.
And it lies completely outside the control of any government.
This group and its new money are soon going to leave everyone behind. Every last person in this country... and every other country in the entire world.
This breakthrough represents a critically important new way for humans and machines to communicate and cooperate. And there’s no doubt it will result in a radical reset of our financial system.
You see, this new wave means an entirely new kind of money and an entirely new kind of ownership structure, for virtually every important asset in the world.
This is much bigger than a simple evolutionary step in technology... it's a "hard fork" – a change that happens, which can never be undone... which permanently changes entire societies.
The thing is, because this change is still in its infancy, many people don’t yet see the potential or future impact this breakthrough will bring.
But the Digerati – the richest and most well-connected people in the business world today – do…
- Billionaire tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says: “The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate... We’re quite confident that when we’re sitting here in 20 years, we’ll be talking about [this technology] the way we talk about the Internet today.”
- Bill Gates said something similar in a video: “Innovations like vaccines and high yielding crops have changed the future for billions of people. We’re on the cusp of another breakthrough innovation.”
- Jack Ma is the founder of China’s biggest tech company (Alibaba), and says this technology, “Could change our world more than people imagine.”
- American broadcaster and film maker Max Keiser even said that if this technology would have been around sooner, “9/11 would never have happened.”
This is why the richest and most competitive companies in the world are now quietly implementing this new monetary technology, although it’s rarely mentioned in the mainstream press…
Amazon began using it in May 2018.
The makers of Budweiser beer began quietly using it in 2018 – around the same time Google began using it too. Visa and Mastercard were among the first big companies to try out this new invention, back in 2016. And Starbucks first gave it a try just a few months ago, in May 2019.
The smartest and richest people and companies in the world are learning everything they can and testing this new technology because it represents a critically important new way for humans and machines to communicate, cooperate, and do business.
But again… because it’s still in its infancy, most people don’t yet fully recognize what’s happening…
The sad thing is, as the lights go out for so much of America, everyone who has been left behind will turn on each other like never before..
It won't be a war of nationalism – between countries and big armies. It will be a war of the "Digerati" – between people who understand how to use this new technology, and everyone else.
This battle has already begun.
Please, heed these warnings, and help others understand them, too.
Because this is a seminal moment that will determine your family’s fate for many years to come.
WHICH SIDE WILL YOU BE ON?
Just like Amazon took over retail… and just as Uber took over cabs, digital technology is now taking over our money — how we use it, save it, spend it, and enter into deals and contracts to earn it, lend it, and invest it.
We believe that in only a few years…
Governments will discover that the majority of the world’s economic power has fled to digital money – a new form of money that can’t be seized, can’t be taken by force, and that only retains its value where property and privacy are respected.
We’ve known this was coming for years…
Back in 1999, Nobel Prize Winning Economist Milton Friedman explained how this would happen. He wrote:
“One thing that’s missing but will soon be developed is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A – the way I can take a $20 bill and hand it over to you, and you may get that without knowing who I am.”
Why is this inevitable?
Several reasons…
First, because our entire financial system as it exists today is a mirage created by the government – based on unlimited paper money and endless credit.
Today, our government prints trillions of dollars out of thin air. We created about $3 trillion new dollars to deal with the coronavirus crisis.
Even more disturbing, 25% of the government debt issued around the world now has negative interest rates.
Negative interest rates, by the way, mean you have to pay the government to lend them your money! In Switzerland some banks have charged clients 0.75% per year for large deposits.
Yes, you read that correctly — banks want you to pay them to hold onto your money.
History will look back on this period with disbelief… that so many people could have been fooled, for so long, into thinking that this was a good idea.
These distortions of our monetary system have caused prices for our most critical needs – like health care, housing, and education – to soar to levels beyond the reach of the middle class.
It’s why the rich get richer, while everyone else falls behind.
The rich have access to assets that benefit from all this money creation, like stocks, real estate, art, and private businesses.
Meanwhile… the lights continue to go out for most Americans, as they go deeper and deeper into debt, falling farther behind.
Today, American companies and families are deeper in debt than ever in history. Students owe more than $1.5 trillion in college debt. We owe $1 trillion on our credit cards. We owe more than $1 trillion for car loans.
Sure, this current system has been great for the wealthy, but we all know it simply cannot last. The financial promises we’ve made simply can’t be kept much longer. The debts we’ve accrued cannot possibly be repaid.
Even worse, if you're holding traditional currencies like dollars, euros, or yen — you're losing wealth, every single day.
Even if your bank is not yet charging you to hold your money, the worthless currencies issued by today’s governments lose roughly half their purchasing power each decade!
Look at this chart that shows how quickly your saved dollars lose value over the years…
And if all of that weren’t bad enough…
With the permission of our government, the banks, credit card firms, and other money institutions now get away with ripping off the public at every turn…
Banks pay you nothing in interest… yet charge you $3 or more just to get your own money out of an ATM machine… or $50 to send a bank wire.
Credit card companies get away with charging 20% interest on late payments… but if the credit card company allows someone to fraudulently open up a new credit card in your name, they call it “identity theft” and it’s somehow your fault.
These companies charge businesses 2% to 3% of every purchase made. Many businesses, including ours, will soon never, ever accept a credit card that charges 3% of every sale.
It should be so obvious to anyone who bothers to take a careful look that today’s entire financial system is corrupt, broken, and simply will not last.
The good news is, a new system of money has emerged – and it’s going to radically change our world over the next few years.
And if you miss out on this development, you are going to regret it for the rest of your life.
Today, nearly every member of the Digerati we know is desperately seeking a way out of our highly regulated, public, and bankrupt global financial system.
You simply must gain a basic understanding of these alternative assets, and the best way to grow and protect your money going forward.
If you’d like to learn more, including specific details on the 3 Critical Steps we believe you must take today, take at least a few minutes to watch Eric’s full video presentation, which goes into more detail on this subject.
We’ve posted his analysis on our website. You can access it for free by clicking here.
He’ll explain not only the 3 steps you should take, but also a way to save 75% off the regular price of our financial research.
