The prices of food and other essential things keep rising. Newspapers and TV channels celebrate it in catchy headlines. But the number of private vehicles on the roads keeps increasing indicating that people have money to buy them and fill their tanks with fuel. The number of people spending time in expensive shopping malls and multiplexes have not decreased. So who is affected by the inflation and price rise? Economist and Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, delivered a speech recently to the AFL-CIO convention and said: “ 95% of the gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the upper 1% (in the USA). The rest — the 99% — never really recovered. “We have become the advanced country with the highest level of inequality, with the greatest divide between the rich and the poor . ” The situation is not confined to the world’s most “advanced country.” It is replicated in every country which follows the same economic policies, including India. The American economic policies
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