World’s 10 richest men saw wealth more than double during pandemic, while 160 million fall into poverty: report
At this rate, they won’t even be able to eat cake.
As the incomes of 99% of the world’s people dropped during the pandemic and 160 million were forced into poverty, the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men more than doubled, according to a new report from Oxfam, an international group that works against inequality, injustice and poverty.
During the first two years of the COVID pandemic, those fortunes shot up from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, a rate of $15,000 per second, or $1.3 billion per day, Oxfam said, while everyone else’s plummeted.
This happened even as one person died every four seconds from the effects of inequality, Oxfam said in a new report, “Inequality Kills,” published ahead of the virtual State of the World sessions sponsored by the World Economic Forum. That’s 21,000 people daily, a “conservative finding” calculated by analyzing global deaths stemming from gender-based violence, hunger, climate breakdown and lack of access to health care, Oxfam said.
“If these 10 men were to lose 99.999 percent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 percent of all the people on this planet,” Oxfam International executive director Gabriela Bucher said in a statement. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”
Oxfam calculated the stark figures by utilizing data from the Forbes 2021 Billionaires List to determine the world’s richest men: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and family, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffett. The 99% figure comes from the World Bank, Oxfam said, and the figures on the share of wealth were culled from the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s Global Wealth Databook 2021.
Collectively the fortunes of the richest grew by $821 billion from March 2020 through the end of November 2021, Oxfam found.
“Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic,” Bucher said. “Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom. Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to billions of people. The result is that every kind of inequality imaginable risks rising. The predictability of it is sickening. The consequences of it kill.”
Oxfam recommended a billionaires’ wealth tax, though the idea has met with massive resistance in Washington.
“There is no shortage of money,” Bucher said. “That lie died when governments released $16 trillion to respond to the pandemic.”
She blamed instead “a shortage of courage and imagination” to solve the problems.
The report came out just ahead of the scheduled World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which has been postponed, with a scaled-down version happening online because of the omicron variant of the coronavirus sweeping the globe. Normally, thousands of leaders from the corporate and political worlds, plus celebrities, economists, journalists and other luminaries in their fields would be gathering in the Swiss ski resort town this week to hold panel discussions on the state of the world, amid parties and schmooze fests.
In addition to the other findings, Oxfam said that not only has wealth among those few skyrocketed, but it has also increased more since the pandemic’s beginning than it has at any time over the past 14 years, with a $5 trillion surge that’s the biggest on record in billionaire gains.
“This year, what’s happening is off the scale,” Danny Sriskandarajah, chief executive of Oxfam Great Britain, told BBC News. “There’s been a new billionaire created almost every day during this pandemic. Meanwhile 99% of the world’s population are worse off because of lockdowns, lower international trade, less international tourism, and as a result of that, 160 million more people have been pushed into poverty. Something is deeply flawed with our economic system.”
