A new report from Oxfam International details how skyrocketing inequality during two years of the global Covid-19 pandemic surged to a point where a new billionaire was created in the world nearly every day while over one million people are now being pushed into poverty at almost the same daily rate. The new report–titled “Profiting From Pain”–is the latest accounting of how the pandemic has only deepened grotesque discrepancies between the haves and have-nots of the world, showing that while 573 new billionaires were created since the pandemic began, approximately one billionaire every 30 hours, an estimated 263 million are expected to “crash into extreme poverty” this year–a rate of one million people every 33 hours.
Today, 2,668 billionaires — 573 more than in 2020 — own $12.7 trillion, an increase of $3.78 trillion.
The world’s ten richest men own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of humanity, 3.1 billion people.
A worker in the bottom 50 percent would have to work for 112 years to earn what a person in the top 1 percent gets in a single year.
— source commondreams.org | May 23, 2022