Earth’s Billionaires / Millionaires Now Control Half the World’s Personal Wealth
“The rich are becoming much richer and doing so at a much faster rate.”
(The AEGIS Alliance) – Billionaires and Millionaires control almost half of all the planet’s personal wealth. It reached $201.9 trillion in 2017, a recent report from Boston Consulting Group reveals.
“The share of global wealth held by millionaires increased to almost 50 percent in 2017, compared with just under 45 percent in 2012, driven mainly by higher-wealth individuals investing in higher-return assets,” says the report (pdf).
To sum it up, as Bloomberg described it, “The rich are getting a lot richer and doing so a lot faster.”
This especially rings true in the United States, where the GOP controls Congress and are making efforts to continue decreasing taxes on the nation’s richest corporations and people at the cost of working force families.
“North America remained the richest global region in 2017 in terms of personal wealth, which expanded by 8 percent to $86.1 trillion,” the report notes. “North American wealth was highly concentrated in the over-$5-million segment, which held 42 percent of investable wealth.”
Researchers discovered that “residents of North America held over 40 percent of global personal wealth, followed by residents of Western Europe with 22 percent. The strongest region of growth was Asia, which posted a 19 percent increase.”
Even though China currently holds fewer billionaires and millionaires than the US, the report’s main author by the name of Anna Zakrzewski stated to Bloomberg that researchers are expecting the amount of Chinese millionaires to rise at four times the rate of the US. “China will continue to experience similar growth as in the past,” she said, “and this will mean that over the next five years, there will be more wealth created in China than in the U.S.”
Although, o matter where this wealth comes from, it is likely to stay concentrated in the pockets of the world’s wealthiest people. The AEGIS Alliance previously published an article about an Oxfam study released in January with findings that in 2017, “a new billionaire was created every two days.” According to that report, “82 percent of all wealth created went to the top 1 percent of the world’s richest while zero percent—absolutely nothing—went to the poorest half of the global population.”
Meanwhile in the US, leaders of religion, and advocates who are anti-poverty launched a new Poor Person’s Campaign— which had inspiration by similar efforts of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in previous decades, with organizing nonviolent actions directly, with demands that lawmakers at every level of government “address the enmeshed evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation, and America’s distorted national morality.”
The campaign came as 43 percent of United States households aren’t able to afford “a bare-bones household budget of housing, child care, food, transportation, and healthcare,” stated a United Way study published this past month.
It noted that “the three wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent ,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had responded to those findings by tweeting, “Is that really the kind of society we want to be living in?”
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
