Pandemic profiteers and a transparency check-up
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Some years are longer than others, and the last twelve months seems to have stretched over an age. Still, it was in fact only a year ago that most of us entered lockdown for the first time, so it seems a good time to look at how the oligarchs have managed.
Americans for Tax Fairness publishes a daily-updated list, showing quite how much US billionaires’ wealth has grown over the last twelve months. Spoiler alert: it’s been a lot, a cumulative gain of around $1.3 trillion. What I found particularly striking about the figures is not so much what a great year Elon Musk has had (net worth up 524.1%!), or Jeff Bezos, but how there has been a general across-the-board increase for everyone who measures their wealth with nine zeros at the end, including even those furthest from the funky new economy of online shopping and bitcoin-powered electric cars. Even the Walmart-owning Waltons saw their wealth increase by more than 15%.
- “The pandemic profiteers are extracting windfalls of wealth during a time of widespread suffering for the majority of people,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program on Inequality. “They exploit the artificial markets created by the pandemic, including having their Main Street competition shuttered and our increased dependence on online technologies.”
Sadly, we don’t have equivalent up to the minute figures for the rest of the world’s billionaires but, at the end of 2020, Oxfam estimated that – over the course of the pandemic to that date – the mega-rich had added around $3.9 trillion to their net worth.