By Isaac Davis
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 1900s 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.
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.
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.
The silver spoon crowd. None of them earned any of it. They sure want to throw us under the bus.
None of them have any idea how the other 99% live. We pinch dollars and they pinch millions. All this horse shit about how the rich, made richer, will create jobs.
They bought it with phony paper money printed by their banker friends. End the federal reserve privately owned bank.
Isn’t POTUS one of them? And who are the new tax deductions geared to? Big Business. And where do most lobbyists come from? Big business. And who do politicians cater to above the people? Big business. Most of this 6 trillion sits in overseas accounts and the crooks/banks are trying to find a way to get the cash back into the US. So do tell, what happens when all this cash suddenly appears? Low dollar value if not a collapse, Huge inflation and high Gold prices. Maybe thats why Russia and China have been buying gold by the tons lately, they see our demise coming.
china and russia are run by the council of seven j3ws
2018 elections coming, if not yourself, start finding people who will stand
the law is in your favour – you do NOT have to be a member of either party
the independents need to get started, and once impetus is in their favour, the TWO PARTIES will fall apart, sh1t, the hillarious one has already destroyed the DNC
How about the trillionaires? You know, the guys that run the west’s central banks where they create “money” out of thin air and then use it to buy real stuff and politicians.
We must rid ourselves of the federal reserve and central banks. These banks print the magic paper money . Then the banks let their elite friends have this paper at tiny to no interest. They run out and buy the best assets, and now own 95% of the world’s resources. America’s wake up we’ve been so scamed. Our dollar is devalued to five cents, they pump up the high inflation robbing us of wealth throughput our lives. Why should evil people like Rothshit family print the world’s money enslaving humanity? Your children will be working longer, harder, and not have anything as the billionaire class owns it all.
but, but, but they are the job creators….
if it wasn’t those self-same oxygen thieves who hold more wealth between 6 or 8 of them than most of the rest of the planet, who print the fiat notes (that are worthless – ask any zimbabwean, the problem with paper money is comfort, especially when toilet paper has any kind of real worth) i would agree with oxfam about “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, stop complaining about what you can’t change, and start training your on-the-ground agents to teach their audience about fishing, stop handing out fish
the fishermen can eventually (unfortunately this might be a looooooooooong time) steal their independence back again