Did you ever wonder how the rich made out during madness of the coronavirus pandemic, with all of its economic misery and mandated lockdowns?
A new report released Monday by Oxfam says the billionaires of this world are having “a terrific pandemic.”
The report by the charity group states: “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 a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty.”
“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 Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.
“They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”
Bucher noted: “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.”
“We have a situation where 10 men hold more wealth than that of two-thirds of humanity,” Lyn Morgain, chief executive of Oxfam Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Not only that, but that bottom 40 percent are hanging on by a thread.”
According to Forbes, the 10 richest people as of November 2021, have seen their fortunes grow by $821 billion dollars since March 2020. The 10 richest men were listed as: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffet and the head of the French luxury group LVMH, Bernard Arnault.