THE SET-UP: Every year Oxfam reminds us of the ever-widening disparity between the oligarchs and everyone else. This year, though, it seems more trenchant and, perhaps, more ominous than ever. That’s because 2024 was the year when the word “oligarch” went from left-wing sloganeering to right-there-in-your-face reality. The world’s richest man made an overnight transformation from obscure, nerdy curiosity to ubiquitous powerbroker. The year Elon took over was punctuated by outgoing President Joe Biden’s farewell address. He warned Americans of the growing power of a Tech-Industrial Complex and he identified its oligarchs as a singular threat.
That night, Google searches for “oligarch” spiked and millions of Americans became a little more familiar with the fruits of Supply Side Neoliberalism. Musk and his fellow billionaires are the apotheosis of a process that began 40-plus years ago under Thatcher and Reagan. Wealth and capital have been systematically horded by the Supply Side of the economy thanks to a series of booms and busts.
At the same time, the consumers on the Demand Side of the economy have seen their share of wealth and capital decline with each passing boom and bust cycle. They’ve been trapped by the gravitational law of macroeconomics while the Supply Side took off into the atmosphere. And much like the debt-driven dynamic in the developing world described below by Oxfam (I couldn’t resist that alliteration), consumers find themselves going deeper and deeper in thrall to the Supply Side as high interest credit cards make up the difference between their aspirations and their reality. - jp
TITLE: The age of the multi-centibillionaire
https://www.codastory.com/oligarchy/the-age-of-the-multi-centibillionaire/
EXCERPTS: In 2020, I marvelled at the concept of the “centibillionaire,” someone whose wealth was worth more than $100 billion. Back then, the OG centibillionaire – Jeff “Amazon” Bezos — had just gained his first comrades, ushering in a whole new class of the super-rich.
It’s not even half a decade later, and that already looks hopelessly dated. Pah, everyone and his gran has got $100 billion these days. Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison have already seen their net worth vault past $200 billion, while Elon Musk has more than double that again. This, I think, makes Musk the richest man who’s ever lived, since the previous presumed holder of the title – Mansa Musa, the 14th-century emperor of Mali – owned a mere $400 billion in current terms, much of which he spent on a spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca.
Wealth inequality will be a major issue this year, partly because the creation of a new class of American uber-mega-super-oligarchs is inherently interesting, but also because – as Elon Musk’s unhinged interventions in British and German politics makes clear – this has real consequences for the rest of the world.
Too much discussion of inequality focuses on incomes, such as this piece in the Financial Times with the misleading headline “Inequality hasn’t risen. Here’s why it feels like it has”. If you look at how much people own, however, it’s another story. Since 1977 — the year I was born, as it happens — the richest one percent in America has increased its share of the nation’s stuff from 22.7 percent to 34.9 percent. That is a lot of money.
And money is power, as Francis Bacon didn’t say. If you are wealthy, you get a wildly disproportionate amount of attention, which means you can bend laws, corrupt politics, and reshape the world to suit your vision. It’s often said that modern democracy isn’t one man/one vote, but instead one dollar/one vote. In reality it’s worse than that. A hundred billion dollars buys you a lot more than a hundred billion votes.
This must be great for the centibillionaires but, for those of us who believe in democracy as a vehicle for representing the views of everyone, it’s all the more reason to try to build and/or rebuild defences against the oligarchs.
The dirty secret of the international financial system is that the tools used by Putin and other kleptocrats to hide, move and multiply their stolen wealth were designed not for them, but for Western tax-dodgers. Once shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, Swiss bank accounts, trusts and all the other paraphernalia had been created, financial criminals realised that they liked convenience, value and discretion just as much as tax dodgers did.
Wealthy Westerners haven’t stopped wanting to dodge taxes and scrutiny just because Putin’s a baddie, and transparency measures have proved distinctly unpopular among the one percent as a result. “Sure, I want to stop corrupt crooks from taking over the world via anonymous shell companies, but why should that mean I can’t use them?”
It explains the bizarre ping-pong that was played with the US Corporate Transparency Act at the end of last year. The CTA, passed in the dying days of Trump’s last term in office, obliges states to collect information on who actually owns companies, thus ending the race to the bottom that has allowed Delaware and Nevada, for instance, to demand less information from applicants for corporations than for library cards. This piece of legislation was a big deal. It has taken four years for FinCEN, the Treasury Department’s financial crime experts, to craft the detailed regulations that would make the law a reality, and finally – at the start of 2025 – it was due to start collecting information about who owns what.
The CTA would not actually require this ownership information to be published, it would just be collected and made available to law enforcement agencies. Even that was too much for the improbably-named Texas Top Cop Shop Inc, which sells “tactical gear” to police officers and is suing to stop the CTA.
In early December, a Texas court responded to Texas Top Cop Shop Inc by granting an injunction, preventing the U.S. government from requiring companies to provide ownership information as the CTA demanded. On December 23, a higher court stayed the injunction, and the law was back on. But on December 26, a different panel of judges (who presumably hadn’t had much of a Christmas) stayed the stay on the injunction, and the law was paused again, so the government has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. And that’s where we are at the moment.
Just over two years ago, a similar challenge to transparency measures in the European Union managed to halt them for a while. Fortunately Brussels is pushing out a new package of anti-money laundering measures, which would open up corporate registers to journalists and other bona fide researchers. That’s not to say that the EU has become closed to dodgy money, as this troubling investigation from September revealed, but at least it is trying to expose who owns it.
TITLE: Oxfam: 'How the super-rich are perpetuating modern-day colonialism'
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/oxfam-new-report-inequality-colonialism/
EXCERPTS: Oxfam’s new report, Takers Not Makers: The unjust poverty and unearned wealth of colonial inheritance, published today shows that in 2024, billionaire wealth skyrocketed, increasing three times faster than in 2023. Over the past year, total billionaire wealth increased by $2 trillion and 204 new billionaires were created, on average almost four new billionaires per week.
The report shatters the illusion that extraordinary wealth is a reward for extraordinary talent, or that huge fortunes are built on hard work – the comfortable belief that we live in a meritocracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our report sheds light on two major areas of unearned wealth.
The first is the rise of a new oligarchy fuelled by inheritance, cronyism, and monopoly power. We are seeing an accumulation of wealth and power, further entrenching an economic system that works only for a select few. Our analysis shows that 60% of billionaire wealth is either from crony or corrupt sources, monopoly power, or is inherited.
In 2024, for the first time, there were more billionaires minted through inheritance than entrepreneurship. Every billionaire under the age of 30 inherited their wealth. In the next decade, trillions will be handed down to heirs, much of it largely untaxed, creating a new Downton Abbey era for the 21st century. That is not good for our economy, democracy, or for our collective future.
Beyond inheritance, monopoly power and crony connections to governments are crucial in perpetuating inequality. Monopolistic corporations control markets, dictate terms, and set prices with impunity, further enriching their billionaire owners. Cronyism and corruption allow the super-rich to ensure government works for them, and not for ordinary people.
Beyond this problem of unearned wealth, our report delves deeply into a painful history of colonialism, that casts a long shadow that continues to rupture our world. We know that colonialism benefited the rich countries of the Global North, over the Global South. But further to this, colonialism benefited primarily the richest in rich nations. Empire coincided with huge inequality in colonising powers. To use one example, the richest 10% extracted 50% of all income in the UK throughout the height of the British Empire.
Colonialism and slavery imposed severe exploitation, violence, racism, and domination on colonized people. The effects of the slave trade, which was crucial to the building of economies of European colonies, are still felt today. For example, after the abolition of slavery and its independence from France, Haiti was forced to borrow to reimburse slave owners 150 million francs – the equivalent of $21 billion, with 80% of this going to the richest slave owners. This started the cycle of debt and disaster that continues to date.
And for those who believe that colonialism, however terrible, was a historical crime, I would argue that there is so much in our modern world that is colonial. A system that continues to extract wealth and power from ordinary workers in the Global South to rich people in the Global North, a phenomenon we call "billionaire colonialism."
To use just one example, rich nations use their hard currencies and privileged position in the economic system to extract a constant rent from the Global South, who are forced to borrow in foreign currencies at exorbitant rates. Using new research from the World Inequality Lab we demonstrate that $30 million dollars an hour is being paid by the Global South to the richest 1% in the richest countries. Time and again we find that the flow of money, of resources, is from South to North, from the poorest to the richest nations, when the opposite should be the case. For every $1 given in aid by richer nations, $4 are paid back to rich countries in this way. We know that these resources are not flowing to everyone in rich nations equally but are instead overwhelmingly benefiting the already wealthy. Those who are struggling to pay their bills or heat their homes in rich nations are not those who are responsible for this new, modern economic colonialism, they too are the victims.
TITLE: Billionaire wealth surges by $2 trillion in 2024, three times faster than the year before, while the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-surges-2-trillion-2024-three-times-faster-year-while-number
EXCERPTS:
Billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion in 2024 alone, equivalent to roughly $5.7 billion a day, at a rate three times faster than the year before. An average of nearly four new billionaires were minted every week.
Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990, according to World Bank data.
In 2024, the number of billionaires rose to 2,769, up from 2,565 in 2023. Their combined wealth surged from $13 trillion to $15 trillion in just 12 months. This is the second largest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. The wealth of the world’s ten richest men grew on average by almost $100 million a day —even if they lost 99 percent of their wealth overnight, they would remain billionaires.
This ever-growing concentration of wealth is enabled by a monopolistic concentration of power, with billionaires increasingly exerting influence over industries and public opinion.
Oxfam publishes “Takers Not Makers” today as business elites gather in the Swiss resort town of Davos and billionaire Donald Trump, backed by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, is inaugurated as President of the United States.
“The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable. The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated —by three times— but so too has their power,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar.
“The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed and bought by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, running the world’s largest economy. We present this report as a stark wake up-call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few,” said Behar.
Many of the super-rich, particularly in Europe, owe part of their wealth to historical colonialism and the exploitation of poorer countries. For example, the fortune of billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who has put his sprawling media ‘empire’ at the service of France's nationalist right, was built partly from colonial activities in Africa.
This dynamic of wealth extraction persists today: vast sums of money still flow from the Global South to countries in the Global North and their richest citizens, in what Oxfam’s report describes as modern-day colonialism.
The richest 1 percent in Global North countries like the US, UK and France extracted $30 million an hour from the Global South through the financial system in 2023.
Global North countries control 69 percent of global wealth, 77 percent of billionaire wealth and are home to 68 percent of billionaires, despite making up just 21 percent of the global population.
The average Belgian has about 180 times more voting power in the largest arm of the World Bank than the average Ethiopian.
Low- and middle-income countries spend on average nearly half of their national budgets on debt repayments, often to rich creditors in New York and London. This far outstrips their combined investment in education and healthcare. Between 1970 and 2023, Global South governments paid $3.3 trillion in interest to Northern creditors.
The history of empire, racism and exploitation has left a lasting legacy of inequality. Today, the average life expectancy of Africans is still more than 15 years shorter than that of Europeans. Research shows that wages in the Global South are 87 to 95 percent lower than wages in the Global North for work of equal skill. Despite contributing 90 percent of the labor that drives the global economy, workers in low- and middle-income countries receive only 21 percent of global income.
Globally, women are more often found in the most vulnerable forms of informal employment, including domestic work, than their male counterparts. Migrant workers in rich countries earn, on average, about 13 percent less than nationals, with the wage gap rising to 21 percent for women migrants.
“The ultra-rich like to tell us that getting rich takes skill, grit and hard work. But the truth is most wealth is taken, not made. So many of the so-called ‘self-made’ are actually heirs to vast fortunes, handed down through generations of unearned privilege. Untaxed billions of dollars in inheritance is an affront to fairness, perpetuating a new aristocracy where wealth and power stays locked in the hands of a few,” said Behar.
“Meanwhile, the money desperately needed in every country to invest in teachers, buy medicines and create good jobs is being siphoned off to the bank accounts of the super-rich. This is not just bad for the economy —it’s bad for humanity."
SEE ALSO:
The Growing Inequality in Life Expectancy Among Americans
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/growing-disparity-life-expectancy-racial-ethnic-groups-study/
