Combined Wealth of World’s Billionaires Now Tops $6 Trillion, and Rising Fast
Isaac Davis, Staff Writer
Waking Times
By many economic indicators, the world is seeing an unprecedented boom right now. While this may seem like great news in generalized terms, there are some foreboding anomalies developing which foreshadow very difficult times ahead for the vast majority of the world’s people.
People love a great success story, though, and the numbers on the most recent numbers on global wealth, recently published by UBS, show just how good the world’s billionaires are doing right now. Their wealth is increasing at astronomical rates.
“Billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6tn (£4.5tn) – more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi-millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the UBS / PwC Billionaires report.” [Source]
The UBS Billionaire’s Report 2017 is an indication that we are entering a new and very unique time in history. Not since the Gilded Age of the early 1900’s have we seen such a dramatic rise in the wealth of a small handful of people. This was during the rise of the industrial era, where a small handful of individuals and families were able to reshape entire cultures to work in their favor, ultimately ending in serious backlash from the general public.
Josef Stadler, lead author of the UBS report comments on the widening gap between the super rich and everyone else.
“We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age… We’re at an inflection point… Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?
Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age? Will the second age end or will it proceed?” ~Josef Stadler
A recent report by Oxfam International highlights the dramatic rise in income equality by noting that the combined wealth of the world’s top 8 individual billionaires is more than the lower half of the world’s population, some 3.6 billion people. The intention of the report was to bring awareness to the unfairness and injustice inherent in our global economic system.
“It calls for a fundamental change in the way we manage our economies so that they work for all people, and not just a fortunate few.” [Oxfam]
Interestingly, as Waking Times reported in January of 2017, estimates of Rothschild family wealth are in the neighborhood of $2 trillion, when you include holdings of a number of members of this one family. This fact sheds additional light on how the concentration of wealth actually works, demonstrating that depending on how you slice up the numbers, the number of wealth controllers in our world keeps shrinking.
READ: THE INSANE THINGS THE 1% IS DOING WITH THE WEALTH THEY’RE STEALING FROM US
This is truly a new gilded age, and the question is, how much more accumulation and concentration of wealth will be tolerated by a vast majority of people who are working under a system of laws, regulations, taxation and inflation which gives extraordinary advantages to those already living like kings.
Meanwhile global debt is also growing at an astronomical pace, with the United States alone owing an estimated $20 trillion to who knows who? So, the numbers reflect more than just the wealth in equality, they also speak to the debt inequality, as generations of people to come are born into a system of debt servitude.
The following video presentation sheds light on just how out of balance wealth inequality is in America.
Read more articles from Isaac Davis.
About the Author
Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here.
This article (Combined Wealth of World’s Billionaires Now Tops $6 Trillion, and Rising Fast) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Isaac Davis and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.