Super-Rich Are Getting Richer During The Pandemic

[yankeedoodle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHu2yKG2-V0


Kim Iversen

The pandemic shutdown has created the greatest wealth heist in a lifetime. The rich are only getting richer.

America's Super-Rich See Their Net Worth Increase $282
https://www.mintpressnews.com/super-rich-see-wealth-rise-282-billion-three-weeks-coronavirus/267027/

Jeff Bezos Net Worth Has Increased $24
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-net-worth-increased-220001911.html

LA City Councilman Proposes Buying Up Distressed Properties
https://www.foxla.com/news/la-city-councilman-proposes-using-federal-stimulus-funds-to-buy-distressed-properties-for-homeless-housing

Europe Is Worried About Chinese Takeovers
https://qz.com/1843832/europe-fears-chinese-corporate-takeovers-tied-to-covid-19/

[yankeedoodle]

Same thing happening in Britain:

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, [a]fter working as an analyst at Goldman's,...was then a partner in a hedge fund management firm. He is not only extremely wealthy himself, he married the daughter of a billionaire. The idea that 'Very Rich Rishi' is going to close tax havens or get billionaires to foot the Covid-19 bill is absurd. On the contrary, we can be sure that whatever measures are imposed, it will be the 0.1 percent who do best of all.

In late April Forbes magazine reported how well billionaires – and the banks – were doing under the pandemic.

And when the Covid-19 crisis is over, (or even before it's over) the super-rich and the banks will be able to swoop and buy up companies and assets on the cheap, increasing their wealth still further.

Meanwhile, ordinary people in Britain are likely to face an extremely tough time of things, for many years to come. Job losses (when the furlough period ends), tax rises, pension freezes and wage freezes will be the 'new normal'. The idea that the huge financial cost of shutting the economy down for weeks, or even months on end would somehow not affect the majority of people in a negative way was extraordinarily naive. There's no such thing as a free lunch, as millions of Britons are about to find out. 

Read the full article here:

Prepare for post-2008 austerity nostalgia: £300bn to be paid in UK for Covid-19 & it WON'T be billionaires who foot the bill
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/488583-covid-cost-austerity-billion-uk/

[yankeedoodle]

Bezos, Zuckerberg & Musk added $115 BILLION to their fortunes during pandemic
https://www.rt.com/business/496515-billionaires-wealth-growth-pandemic/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome

While millions of jobs are projected to be lost this year as a result of the coronavirus crisis, tech moguls have seen their fortunes skyrocket. They are getting richer even faster as the pandemic drives more activity online.

The collective wealth of tech billionaires in Bloomberg's index (a ranking of the world's 500 richest people) has nearly doubled since 2016, from $751 billion to $1.4 trillion today. That is a faster rate than in every other sector.

Seven of the world's 10 richest people are from the technology sector, with a combined net worth of $666 billion, up $147 billion this year. Of the top 10, only non-tech billionaires have lost money this year – luxury mogul Bernard Arnault and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett.

Big winners so far include Elon Musk, whose net worth has more than doubled to $69.7 billion on the back of surging Tesla shares. The world's richest man, Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos, got richer by $63.6 billion, with his fortune having exceeded $200 billion. Another chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, enjoyed a net-worth surge of $9.1 billion.

"We moved the brick-and-mortar economy to an online economy dramatically," a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Luigi Zingales, told Bloomberg.

"Probably the same thing would have happened in a longer period of time. Now it's happening in weeks instead of years," he said.

Statistics show that five of the largest American tech companies (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft) have market valuations equivalent to about 30 percent of US gross domestic product. That's almost double what these were at the end of 2018.