1 new billionaire every 30 hours! Shocking report highlights crisis profiteering

A shocking report by Oxfam showed that a billionaire was created every 30 hours during the last 2 years and a million people fell into poverty at the same rate during the pandemic.

Presenting the report as the world's elite gathered at Davos, Oxfam showcased 2,668 billionaires -- 573 more than in 2020 -- own $12.7 trillion, an increase of $3.78 tn.

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Data also revealed that the world's ten richest men own more wealth than the bottom 40 per cent of humanity or 3.1 billion people. In fact the richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The development charity highlighting crisis profiteering said spiralling global food prices had helped create “62 new food billionaires” in just 24 months.

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Oxfam also called for the introduction of permanent wealth taxes to “rein in extreme wealth and monopoly power”. The report urged governments should follow Argentina’s example and introduce a “one-off solidarity tax on billionaires’ pandemic windfalls”. The Argentinian tax raised 223bn pesos ($1.8 bn) last year.