Lenny looks at the Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini World Wealth Report and sees how the richest people in the world took more of our money thanks to the economic crisis:
The total liquid wealth of the rich in 2009, at $39 trillion, was actually more than two-thirds of world GDP in the same year, almost triple the GDP of the US, and nearly ten times that of China. Another way of looking at it is that the increase in liquid assets from 2008 to 2009 held by the rich was about $6.5 trillion, more than 10% of total GDP in 2009. This was in a year in which world GDP actually shrank by 0.8%.
The distinction between “economic and market drivers of wealth” is very important, and very telling. Most of the new wealth held by the rich was, as you can see, not produced by economic growth, but by stock market capitalisation. In other words, market relations, sustained by state intervention, facilitated the transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich at a time when most of the world’s economy was such that the direct exploitation of labour could not sustain high profit rates. That’s what the bail-outs did; it’s what they were intended to do. Another intended consequence is that there were not only more high net worth individuals, 10 million of them globally (0.014% of the world’s population), but the ‘ultras’ did far better at increasing their share of liquid assets than mere millionaires – thus wealth became even more concentrated than it had been, among a mere 36,300 people, or 0.0005% of the population. The corollary of this has been, and will continue to be, a general decline in the living standards of the working class in most of the advanced capitalist economies: at the same time as the wealth of the richest grew, global unemployment rose by 14.4%.