The American economy is perilously fragile. Concentration of wealth is to blame | Robert Reich

The imbalance is more extreme than it's been in over a century. We need to fix this structural problem before it's too late

Policymakers and the media are paying too much attention to how quickly the US economy will emerge from the pandemic-induced recession, and not nearly enough to the nation's deeper structural problem - the huge imbalance of wealth that could enfeeble the economy for years.

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A giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. As in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

There's so much wealth at the top that the prices of luxury items of all kinds are soaring

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US