The world’s billionaires made $5 trillion in the last year at an ‘unprecedented’ rate – The Khaama Press News Agency

The world’s billionaires are amassing wealth at a rate “unprecedented in human history,” according to a recent report by Oxfam International.

The charity’s “Inequality Kills” report found that the planet’s 2,755 billionaires saw their accumulated wealth increase by $5 trillion, a sum greater than the combined market capitalizations of Apple and Amazon, as of March 2021, of $8. .6 billion to $13.8 billion.

“Billionaire wealth has grown more since the pandemic began than in the last 14 years,” the report says. That growth has been fueled by government intervention around the world, which has propped up economies and lifted stock prices, the report says.

The growth in wealth has been so great in such a short time that “the concentration of wealth at the top now exceeds the peak of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century,” says Oxfam.

In fact, since 1995, the top 1% of the world’s richest people have seen 19 times more wealth growth than the bottom 50%, the report says.

“If these 10 men lost 99.999% of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99% of all the people on the planet,” said Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam Executive Director. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”