New Data Reveals Billionaires Got Richer Thanks to COVID – While (Almost) Everyone Else Got Poorer
Billionaire fortunes returned to their pre-pandemic highs in just nine months, while recovery for the world’s poorest people could take over a decade, according to a new Oxfam report.
See: 2020 in Review — The Year for Mark Zuckerberg
Find: How Coronavirus Revealed America Is Failing Children — and Parents
In its newly released 2021 “The Inequality Virus” report, Oxfam, the global organization working to end poverty, says that the pandemic has led to an increase in inequality in almost every country at once, representing the first time this has happened since records began.
“The virus has exposed, fed off and increased existing inequalities of wealth, gender and race. Over two million people have died, and hundreds of millions of people are being forced into poverty while many of the richest — individuals and corporations — are thriving,” the report notes.
“This level of hurt for so many people requires policy makers to show radical political courage,” Paul O’Brien, vice president for policy and advocacy at Oxfam America, said in a tweet.
See: 30 Places in America That Are Getting Poorer
Find: Essential Money Tips for Surviving the ‘Pandemic Spiral’
The report notes that while the stock market collapsed in the first months of the pandemic, this setback was short-lived for the world’s richest. Within nine months, the “the top 1000 billionaires, mainly White men, had recovered all the wealth they had lost” since COVID-19 hit.
In contrast, the report notes that after the 2008 financial crisis, it took five years for billionaire wealth to return to its pre-crisis highs. “Worldwide, billionaires’ wealth increased by a staggering $3.9 [trillion] between 18 March 18 and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth now stands at $11.95 [trillion], which is equivalent to what G20 governments have spent in response to the pandemic,” according to the report.
The report also notes that in September 2020, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “could have paid each of Amazon’s 876,000 employees a one-off $105,000 bonus with the wealth he accumulated between March and August 2020 alone, and still be as wealthy as he was before the pandemic.”
See: Global Catastrophes Jeff Bezos Could Fix and Still Be the Richest Man in the World
Find: What 2020 Meant for Women in the Workforce
Other findings of the report include that globally, women are overrepresented in the sectors of the economy that are hardest hit by the pandemic. “If women were represented at the same rate as men in those sectors, 112 million women would no longer be at high risk of losing their incomes or jobs.”
In addition, the report notes that in the U.S., people of color are more likely to die of COVID-19 than white people are. “If their death rate had been the same as White people’s, then as of December 2020, close to 22,000 Latinx and Black people would have still been alive.”
More From GOBankingRates:
This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: New Data Reveals Billionaires Got Richer Thanks to COVID – While (Almost) Everyone Else Got Poorer
