10 world richest men’s wealth doubled in pandemic – Oxfam
By Dele Ojo
The COVID-19 pandemic has made the world’s wealthiest much more richer but has led to more people living in poverty, according to Oxfam, a charity organisation. Lower incomes for the world’s poorest contributed to the death of 21,000 people each day, its report claims.
But the world’s 10 richest men have more than doubled their collective fortunes since March 2020, Oxfam said, in a report it typically releases on global inequality at the start of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. That event usually sees thousands of corporate and political leaders, celebrities, campaigners, economists and journalists gather in the Swiss ski resort for panel discussions, drinks parties and schmoozing.
According to Forbes figures cited by the charity, the world’s 10 richest men are: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and family, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffet.
According to Oxfam, the world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day— during the first two years of Covid-19 pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty.
“While collectively their wealth grew from $700bn to $1.5tn, there is significant variation between them, with Mr Musk’s fortune growing by more than 1,000%, while Mr Gates’ rose by a more modest 30%” the report revealed.
“If these ten 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,” said Oxfam International’s Executive Director, Gabriela Bucher. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”
In a new briefing “Inequality Kills,” published Monday, ahead of the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda, Oxfam said that inequality is contributing to the death of at least 21,000 people each day, or one person every four seconds. This is a conservative finding based on deaths globally from lack of access to healthcare, gender-based violence, hunger, and climate breakdown.
Billionaires’ wealth has risen more since COVID-19 began than it has in the last 14 years. At $5 trillion dollars, this is the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began. A one-off 99 percent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay: to make enough vaccines for the world;
to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries; All this, while still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.
“Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. 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,” said Bucher.
Oxfam’s report is based on data from the Forbes Billionaires List and the annual Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, which gives the distribution of global wealth going back to 2000.The Forbes survey uses the value of an individual’s assets, mainly property and land, minus debts, to determine what he or she “owns”. The data excludes wages or income.
It also said that due to the fact prices have risen during the pandemic, it has adjusted for inflation using the US Consumer Price Index (CPI), which tracks how fast the cost of living has is increasing over time.
Oxfam’s report, which was also based on data from the World Bank, said a lack of access to healthcare, hunger, gender-based violence and climate breakdown contributed to one death every four seconds.
It said 160 million more people were living on less than $5.50 (£4.02) a day than would have been without the impact of the pandemic. The World Bank uses $5.50 a day as a measure of poverty in upper-middle-income countries.
The report also says the pandemic is forcing developing countries to slash social spending as national debts rise.
Inequality between countries is expected to rise for the first time in a generation. Developing countries, denied access to sufficient vaccines because of rich governments’ protection of pharmaceutical corporations’ monopolies, have been forced to slash social spending as their debt levels spiral and now face the prospect of austerity measures. The proportions of people with COVID-19 who die from the virus in developing countries is roughly double than in rich countries.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed openly both the motive of greed, and the opportunity by political and economic means, by which extreme inequality has become an instrument of economic violence,” said Bucher. “After years now of researching and campaigning on the issue, this is the shocking but inevitable conclusion that Oxfam has had to reach today.”
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