My Take | Why extreme wealth should be a crime
- A new study by Oxfam finds that a billionaire is minted every 30 hours globally during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic while a million people will fall into extreme poverty every 33 hours this year
George Santayana got it all wrong. People who have learned from history to avoid repeating past mistakes often find new ways to make worse ones.
And so, here we are, stuck with an international monetary system that always has the back of the biggest corporations and multibillionaires, at the slightest sign of an economic crisis and at the expense of most people.
No one, therefore, should be surprised by a new study by Oxfam, which found that a billionaire was minted every 30 hours during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
The combined wealth of billionaires worldwide is equivalent to 13.9 per cent of global gross domestic product.
In contrast, 263 million more people are expected to fall into extreme poverty globally this year, at a rate of a million people every 33 hours.
None of this is new, other than the latest figures. The only reason the study attracted attention was because it was deliberately timed to coincide with the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that is, the forum for those very same rich and powerful people.
How did we get here? No doubt it’s very, very complicated. But one main reason is surely the takeaway consensus lesson that the most influential economists and most powerful policymakers in recent generations have learned from the Great Depression: firefight with all you’ve got, don’t let a crisis burn itself out.