Ten richest men double their fortunes in pandemic while incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall

New billionaire minted every 26 hours, as inequality contributes to the death of one person every four seconds.

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. In West Africa, billionaires saw their wealth increase by 38% during the pandemic while the bottom 90% saw the share of their wealth drop in 2020.

“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 Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”

In a new briefing “Inequality Kills,”published today ahead ofthe World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda, Oxfam says that inequality is contributing to the death of at least 21,000 people each day, or one person every four seconds. This is a conservative finding based on deaths globally from lack of access to healthcare, gender-based violence, hunger, and climate breakdown. In the Sahel, inequalities and the sense of injustice they provoke dangerously fuel the tensions and conflicts that shake the sub region.

“It has never been so important to start righting the violent wrongs of this obscene inequality by clawing back elites’ power  and extreme  wealth including through  taxation —getting  that  money back into the real economy and to save lives,"she said.

Billionaires’ wealth has risen more since COVID-19 began than it has in the last 14 years. At $5 trillion dollars, this is the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began. West Africa has not been spared. The wealth of the three richest men in the region increased by $6.4 billion in the 17 months of the pandemic while the equivalent of seven million jobs were lost. A one-off 99 percent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay:

• to make enough vaccines for the world;
• to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries
• Allthis, while  still  leaving  these  men  $8  billion  better  off than  they  were  before  the pandemic.

“Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. 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,” said Bucher.

Extreme  inequality  is  a  form  of  economic  violence, where  policies  and  political decisionsthat perpetuate the wealth and power of a privileged few result in direct harm to the vast majority of ordinary people across the world and the planet itself. “The world’s response to the pandemic has unleashed this economic violence particularly acutely across  racialized, marginalized  and  gendered  lines. As COVID-19 spikes this  turns  to surges  of gender-based violence, even as yet more unpaid care is heaped upon women and girls,” Bucher said.

• The  pandemic has set  gender  parity back from  99  years  to  now  135  years.  Women collectively lost $800 billion in earnings in 2020, with 13 million fewer women in work nowthan there were in 2019.252 men have more wealth than all 1 billion women and girls in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean combined.
• Inequality between countries is expected to rise for the first time in a generation. Developing countries, denied access to sufficient vaccines because of rich governments’ protection of pharmaceutical corporations’ monopolies, have been forced to slash social spending as their debt levels spiral and now face the prospect of austerity measures. In West Africa, an austerity plan imposed by the IMF could trigger the worst inequality crisis in decades.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed openly both the motive of greed, and the opportunity by political and economic means, by which extreme inequality has become an instrument of economic violence,” said Bucher. “After years now of researching and campaigning on the issue, this is the shocking but inevitable conclusion that Oxfam has had to reach today.”

Despite  the  huge  cost  of fighting  the  pandemic,  in  the  past  two  years  rich  country  governments have failed to increase taxes on the wealth of the richest and continued to privatize public goods and services.

Inequality goes to the heart of the climate crisis, as the richest 1 percent emit more than twice as much  CO2  as  the  bottom  50  percent  of  the  world,  driving  climate  change  throughout  2020  and 2021 that has contributed to wildfires, floods, tornadoes, crop failures and hunger.

“Inequality at such pace and scale is  happening by  choice, not chance,” Bucher said. “Not  only have  our  economic  structures made  all  of  us  less  safe  against  this pandemic,they  are  actively enabling those who are already extremely rich and powerful to exploit this crisis for their own profit.”

Oxfam recommends that governments urgently:

• Claw back the gains made by billionaires by taxing this huge new wealth made since the start of the pandemic through permanent wealth and capital taxes.
• Invest  the  trillions that  could  be raised  by these  taxes toward  progressive spending  on universal healthcare and social protection, climate change adaptation, and gender-based violence prevention and programming.
• Tackle sexist laws that discriminate against women and create new gender-equal laws to uproot violence and discrimination.All sectors of society must urgently define policies that will  ensure  womenand  other  oppressed  groups  are  represented  in  all  decision-making spaces.
• End laws that undermine the rights of workers to unionize and strike, and set up stronger legal standards to protect them.
• Rich  governments  must immediately waive  intellectual  property  rules  over  COVID-19 vaccine  technologies  to  allow  more  countries  to  produce  safe  and  effective  vaccines  to usher in the end of the pandemic.

Bucher said:  "There is no shortage of money. That lie died when governments released $16 trillion to respond to the pandemic. There is only a shortage of courage and imagination needed to break free from the failed, deadly straitjacket of extreme neoliberalism. Governments would be wise to listen to the movements —the young climate strikers, Black Lives Matter activists, #NiUnaMenosfeminists, or the activists of the #EndSARS movement in Nigeria against police violence–who are demanding justice and equality”.