According to the British NGO, the cumulative fortune of billionaires increased by $ 5 trillion, to reach its highest level to date, 13,800 billion. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 160 million people have fallen into poverty.
Le Monde with AFP
The rich are even richer two years after the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19. According to the Oxfam NGO, the wealth of the ten most fortunate men in the world has doubled since the beginning of the year 2020. “Increased economic, gender and racial inequalities and inequalities between countries destroy our world”, denounces The NGO of the fight against poverty, in A report entitled “The inequalities kill” , published on Monday 17 January, a few days before the opening of the World Economic Forum of Davos.
The cumulative fortune of all billionaires has experienced since the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19 “its largest increase ever registered”, of $ 5 trillion, to reach its highest level to date , 13,800 billion. The world now has a new billionaire every twenty-six hours, while 160 million people have fallen into poverty over the same period, calculates the NGO.
The ten richest people in the world understand, according to Forbes magazine, the American ELON MUSK entrepreneur, the Tesla electric car manufacturer’s pattern, Jeff Bezos, the founder of the Amazon e-commerce site, Le French Bernard Arnault, owner of the luxury group LVMH, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of the Social Facebook network, the American businessman Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, the founder of the world number one Database management, Oracle.
a 99% tax on the income of the rich
The NGO adds that “we can defeat extreme poverty through progressive taxation and public and free health systems for all. “An outstanding 99% tax on revenues from the ten richene men’s pandemic would produce enough vaccines for the world, provide universal social and medical protection, finance climate adaptation and reduce violence related to Genre in eighty countries “, give an example the NGO. It specifies that it would still leave “8 billion more than before the pandemic to these men”.
According to Oxfam, inequalities contribute to death “at least 21,000 people a day”, if we are based on the dead due to lack of access to health care, hunger and to the climate crisis. “The billionaires have had a great pandemic. Central banks have injected thousands of billions of dollars into the financial markets to save the economy, many of which have finished in the pockets of billionaires.”
The Global Economic Forum, for its part, warned that the wide inequalities of access to Vaccines against CVIV-19 are likely to weaken the struggle for major international causes, such as climate change. Deferred to the summer of 2022 because of the Omicron Variant, this meeting between business leaders and politicians around the world has been replaced by an online edition that opens on Monday and will continue until January 21st.