Only money

Paul Krugman in yesterday's NY Times:

Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.

Cool, huh? Krugman compares the situation of the average American to that of a Bernard Madoff investor. The creation of wealth via Wall Street's financial engineering was a Ponzi scheme everybody bought into.