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We are into a new era in which most of the rules that most people take for granted are regulating and governing society are largely irrelevant.

Call it the post-capitalism era. It's about capitalism all right. But it's capitalism disconnected from labour or from the factors of production (equipment, buildings), or from the nation-state in which the companies happen to be located.

It is, rather, capitalism functioning in a self-enclosed loop, feeding off itself, endlessly mutating and above all multiplying exponentially.

And because this capital is global, no one has a clue what it – private equity firms, hedge funds, and the new "sovereign wealth" funds set up by some nation-state governments (like China) to escape their own regulations – is doing.

Its principal effect is to make a small number of people, like Schwarzman, unbelievably, unimaginably, wealthy.

Even the old wealthy types are dumbfounded. The retired chair of Goldman Sachs recently described the salaries of CEOs as "shocking" and "outrageous."

. . . .

In his book Richistan, Robert Frank calls this new class "financial foreigners." They may live in the U.S., or London or Hong Kong or Toronto, but they really live in their own space, with their own health system, own transportation system (private jets, limousines), even their own time system (watches that cost up to $600,000).

Except nominally, they aren't Americans or Brits or Chinese or Canadians. Their real nationality is that of "Richistan," because they are very, very, very, rich.

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