By next year, the one percent will have amassed more than half of the world’s wealth, literally.
The rich just keep on getting rich, and by next year, they’ll be even more richer, having accumulated more than half of the world’s wealth.
A new report released today by Oxfam warns that the deepening global inequality is completely unlike anything we’ve seen in recent years. Using research from Credit Suisse and Forbes’ annual billionaires list, the anti-poverty charity was able to assess that the richest 1% of the world controls a whopping 48% of the world’s total wealth, and that number is only expected to grow worse.
If the current trends continue, Oxfam predicts the richest 1% will possess more wealth than the remaining 99% by 2016, according The New York Times.
Further investigate, and you’ll find that the the 80 wealthiest people in the world possess $1.9 trillion, which is almost the same amount shared by 3.5 billion people at the bottom half of the world’s income scale.
Thirty five of these filthy rich 80 were Americans, with a combined wealth of $941 billion. Germany and Russia shared second place, with seven ultra-wealthy individuals each.
Unsurprisingly, the richest amongst the richest were those who excelled in finance, health care, insurance, retail, tech, and extractives (oil, gas) industries, and they paid out a small fortune to lobbyists to maintain their fortune and/or increase their riches. Seventy of the world’s wealthiest were men; eleven members of the elite 80 had simply come into their money via an inheritance.
Oxfam executive director Winnie Byanyima posed a very real question in a letter: “Do we really want to live in a world where the 1 percent own more than the rest of us combined? The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”
This week, more than 2,500 of the world’s most rich and powerful will take their private jets to Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum, where they will chat about the financial markets and economic trends, while eating the finest food and staying in five-star hotels. Oxfam will also be in Switzerland, urging them to tackle the rising inequality situation. The charity hopes to encourage world and business leaders to improve public services, lobby for living wages, end gender pay gaps, and crack down on tax-doding corporations, per Reuters reports.
Meanwhile, there are more than 1 billion people on the planet who live on less than $1.25 a day.
