Richest 1% to own more than rest of world

R

Ricardodaforce

Self requested ban
Suspended / Banned
Messages
18,340
Edit My Images
No
That's the BBC headline reporting on a an Oxfam document that concludes "The richest 1% of people will see their share of global wealth increase to more than 50% in 2016 at the current rate of growth.". This comes on the back of a Credit Suisse report last October which concluded "The richest 1% of the world’s population are getting wealthier, owning more than 48% of global wealth".

Isn't there something disgusting about such a huge disparity in wealth? It really cannot be good for humanity. There is something fundamentally wrong about principles of economics and personal gain.

What's your opinion?
 
I think it is quite unfair but then again do they actually have all that wealth as cash or is it tied up in industry etc and it is only their net worth being used.......? There will always be rich people and a them and us society but how do you redistribute the wealth? Industry would collapse if all the money was gathered together and split evenly......I once read that if it was split the majority if the 1% would be rich again inside a short period of time.....
 
I thought the recent BBC documentary 'The Super-rich and us' was very revealing. It would appear we are returning to the time of the Aristocracy where all of the countries wealth lies in the hands of a few individuals. All because our governments have placed their faith in so-called 'trickle down economics'. 'Quantitive Easing' has made the situation worse seeing the 1% grow increasingly wealthier while the rest of us grow poorer.

I think it's scandalous and a political revolution is called for if we are to maintain a decent society. Trouble is, it ain't going to come from any of our politicians anytime soon because they would appear to maintain this deception of the electorate to further their own interests.

I would urge anyone to watch the documentary if they haven't done so already, it opened my eyes.
 
The 1% are anyone that owns 500k of assets which is nothing in the South East. It's an ordinary house that the more sensible of us living up north would pay a fraction of the price for ;)

The NMW needs to be raised and any companies not paying a living wage should have to pay higher rates of corporation tax to compensate the tax payer for all the subsidies their crap wages need. I also think any companies using zero hours contracts should also have to pay a higher rate of corporation tax instead of the usual rate. Ditto any that have lots of people on self employed contracts where they're not genuinely self employed. It's this bad attitude to employees that have caused problems for most people. If the working majority cannot afford to do things then the entire economy collapses. The input of the super rich isn't something we should be relying on to make our GDP look better!
 
I'm sure I read something a few yeas back that said if the top 1% shared their wealth evenly they would have it all back within 5 yrs.
 
mattyg said:
I'm sure I read something a few yeas back that said if the top 1% shared their wealth evenly they would have it all back within 5 yrs.
Click to expand...

Not if they gave it to me they wouldn't ;)
 
srichards said:
The 1% are anyone that owns 500k of assets which is nothing in the South East. It's an ordinary house that the more sensible of us living up north would pay a fraction of the price for ;)/QUOTE]
Click to expand...
That's incorrect. You are saying that anybody who has assets of £500k is in the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the UK? That's clearly absurd as you have demonstrated with your comment about property values.

I think you'll find that you will need an annual income in the region of £500k to qualify.
 
Last edited:
Cartus said:
That's incorrect. You are saying that anybody who has assets of £500k is in the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the UK? That's clearly absurd as you have demonstrated with your comment about property values.

I think you'll find that you will need an annual income in the region of £500k to qualify.
Click to expand...

In the US the 1% income level is about $380,000 so that's any city boy down south and several heads of councils and universities as our equivalent to theirs. But that's the 1% just in the US not globally. 1% asset level is $8+ million.

The uk is one of the richest nations world so it is entirely possible that a normal person with a slightly expensive house can qualify which what makes it absurd as I thought Oxfam were on about the 1% as a global figure not the 1% in just the UK.

The fact that there isn't a straight declaration of where they are getting the figures from and precisely what they are makes me suspicious.
 
srichards said:
The 1% are anyone that owns 500k of assets which is nothing in the South East. It's an ordinary house that the more sensible of us living up north would pay a fraction of the price for ;)
Click to expand...
It's all relative. If your on the same wages up North then yes, having to pay less for a similar sized property is a good thing. But for some, wages can be a lot less and they can still struggle to be able to afford the lower priced property. I live in Essex and wouldn't have it any other way,

It's pretty much within anyone's potential to earn lots of money and become wealthy, they just have to take or make those opportunities if they want it that much. Sure I'd like that Aston Martin and a few other things, but I'm happy with my lot, I've worked hard (on occasion) for it but I don't begrudge anyone having a lot more.
 
Cartus said:
That's incorrect. You are saying that anybody who has assets of £500k is in the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the UK? That's clearly absurd as you have demonstrated with your comment about property values.

I think you'll find that you will need an annual income in the region of £500k to qualify.
Click to expand...

Top 1% worldwide, I think, since that is what the OP was talking about as he referenced the Credit Suisse report. Not sure where you got that this was to do with the UK only.

According to this report in the Guardian, which in turn also uses the report from Credit Suisse last October as its source, to be in the top 1% of the world's asset holders one needs a worth of $798,000, which is £500,000.

http://www.theguardian.com/business...rcent-half-global-wealth-credit-suisse-report

I'm not in the top 1%, but my parents who live just outside London are, thanks to what has happened to property values there over the last 20-30 years, and they are both what people who like to assign labels would call "working class", left school at 16, Dad clocked on at the factory, Mum was a copy typist, live on the state pension plus small works pensions etc. But they are in the 1% worldwide.
 
Found it. In the wealth report you need to own $798,000 to qualify. This is after any cost of debt has been removed. Roughly £525k of assets. Top 10% is £50k ish so that's about everyone that has bought a house anywhere.
 
srichards said:
Found it. In the wealth report you need to own $798,000 to qualify. This is after any cost of debt has been removed. Roughly £525k of assets. Top 10% is £50k ish so that's about everyone that has bought a house anywhere.
Click to expand...
But I am talking about the UK where, to be in the top 1% of earners you needed to earn in excess of £149K annually as of 2011. If you put the rest of the world into the equation, then you could conceivably include a UK citizen earning a minimum wage in the top 10% of the wealthiest people on the planet. Most of the rest of the world earn very little.
 
The point is, especially in this country, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The basic reason for this is our government's insistence of employing so-call 'Trickle Down' economics where you give huge tax breaks to the rich to encourage wealth in the hope that it will 'trickle down' to the rest of us. The problem is, it doesn't appear to be working that way.

@srichards I apologise for the confusion, I was arguing about the UK and you were arguing (correctly) about the Oxfam headline that relates to the world, although they are essentially the same I think.
 
Last edited:
ST4 said:
What's wrong with success? Nothing.
Click to expand...
I don't think it's quite so simple. We are (in the UK) it seems creating a new 'aristocracy' where all of the wealth is concentrated on a few individuals. The knock-on effect is that the remaining 99% of the population become poorer and it becomes more difficult to attain success. Is it fair that the top earners in this country pay little or no tax? It's the reason that my children will leave college with a huge debt and will be unlikely ever to buy a property, it just makes it much harder to be a 'success'. If I have say £10K to invest, I can get little return on my money, in fact with current interest rates if I put it in the bank, I'm losing money. If Chris Evans buys a Ferrari for £1m, five years later it's worth £3m because the super-rich literally do not know what to do with their dosh. As I said it all make it harder to be successful.

It's interesting that 'Downton Abbey' has been so popular both here and in the US because that's the world we'll be returning to at the rate we are going.
 
Give or take a bean I guess I'm in that 1% if we're looking at it worldwide.

Sadly it just goes to show how many people in this world have nothing.
 
Put your £10k to better use. See it grow on wisely picked investments. Put it down on a £100k flat, mortgage the £90k and put tennents in.

There are millions richer than me, millions poorer. Their money, excess or lack of, is of no interest or consequence to me. Its what I do with what I have which matters to me.

Money has to buy something, if I had kids and lots of money sure I'd private school them, private educate them so they'd hopefully have more later on than their peers, or have the option of having more.

People feel other people's success should be given to them. Why should it? It's not theirs to begin with.
 
One way of shifting it is to raise NMW so businesses have to pay a living wage so we're not subsidising them. Full time wages should be enough to live on and it's time to stop subsidising cheap skate employers. I also think any using zero hours contracts should have to pay a much higher rate of corporation tax so they pay their way. Ditto businesses that use the trick of claiming they have a load of self employed workers when they clearly do not. This is why there has been a massive jump in self employment and being on WTCs is one way to get away from the vile attitude of job centres.

I also think the more normal people know about poor employers and boycott them the better their attitudes will have to become so they remain in business at all.
 
srichards said:
The 1% are anyone that owns 500k of assets which is nothing in the South East. It's an ordinary house that the more sensible of us living up north would pay a fraction of the price for ;)
Click to expand...

Errrr no it's not.
 
ST4 said:
Put your £10k to better use. See it grow on wisely picked investments. Put it down on a £100k flat, mortgage the £90k and put tennents in.
Click to expand...

That's one reason why my kids won't possibly be able to buy a place of their own. Society has to decide on it's priorities, do you want a 'survival of the fittest' zero hour society or do we want the type of society that we lived in 30 years ago?
 
Cartus said:
I thought the recent BBC documentary 'The Super-rich and us' was very revealing. It would appear we are returning to the time of the Aristocracy where all of the countries wealth lies in the hands of a few individuals. All because our governments have placed their faith in so-called 'trickle down economics'. 'Quantitive Easing' has made the situation worse seeing the 1% grow increasingly wealthier while the rest of us grow poorer.
Click to expand...

Apparently quantitative easing is supposed to work on the premise that printing money and giving it to the banks to lend will result in increased spending in the economy. Except the banks aren't using it to lend. And we've already bailed them out with loans to secure their balance sheets and prevent them going bust. And they're still handing out the bonuses and champagne.

Yet, if you printed the same money and used it to increase the wages of the lowest paid public sector workers you could be absolutely certain that it would all be spent in the economy (at a local level), but somehow that's the wrong thing to do?

Does it make sense to anyone?
 
Alastair said:
Apparently quantitative easing is supposed to work on the premise that printing money and giving it to the banks to lend will result in increased spending in the economy. Except the banks aren't using it to lend. And we've already bailed them out with loans to secure their balance sheets and prevent them going bust. And they're still handing out the bonuses and champagne.

Yet, if you printed the same money and used it to increase the wages of the lowest paid public sector workers you could be absolutely certain that it would all be spent in the economy (at a local level), but somehow that's the wrong thing to do?

Does it make sense to anyone?
Click to expand...
Quantative easing apparently injected £80billion into the economy, guess how much the wealth of the richest 1% in the UK has increased - £80billion!
 
I owned and ran a profitable small business for a few years up until 2008. All of a sudden my customers stopped spending money. They were invariably retired middle class folk and they had seen their pensions, investments and subsequently incomes, diminish and they were scared to spend money on non essential items. I was lucky and sold my business to a national company but I know that for many millions of people in this country, their standard of living has deteriorated since '08, while a small number of people have become very, very much richer. Wealth is finite after all.
 
Cartus said:
That's one reason why my kids won't possibly be able to buy a place of their own.
Click to expand...

I hope that's not a mantra your reciting to them, poor buggers.
 
Cartus said:
They are 17 and 19 years old Ruth. My son is studying politics, a subject that for some strange reason interests him. They have some awareness of what's going on, especially my son.
Click to expand...

I see your point Tim, but their ages are irrelivant.
If you constantly tell them "they'll never....they can't....they wont....." acheive something, then the chances are they won't; but only because they've been made to believe it's not worth even trying. JMO of course.
 
ST4 said:
Survival of the fittest, it's human nature
Click to expand...
Absolutely spot-on Steve. Let's do away with social security and the NHS and give all the money to the super rich and watch London property prices rise even further while they desperately try to squirrel away the obscene amounts of money they have coming in. It's kind of a return to Victorian values I guess, but it's not what I want society to be like.
 
ST4 said:
Survival of the fittest, it's human nature
Click to expand...
Hereditary income inequality runs counter to evolutionary pressure. It actively reduces any tendency towards fitness.
 
viv1969 said:
I see your point Tim, but their ages are irrelivant.
If you constantly tell them "they'll never....they can't....they wont....." acheive something, then the chances are they won't; but only because they've been made to believe it's not worth even trying. JMO of course.
Click to expand...
You are suggesting that I recite this as a 'mantra' to my children? Well I don't. But they read the newspapers and watch TV themselves. The reality is that young people cannot generally get on the housing ladder and will be leaving college saddled with massive debts. When I was their age, higher education was paid for by the state and just about anybody with a full-time job could buy a house. Things have changed in 30 years when a house in my area now costs on average 11x the average salary and banks will only lend up to what 3x the borrower earns.
 
ST4 said:
But the forebears made that money, procured the assets to secure the financial well being of their future generations, not the generations of others.
Click to expand...
That's just what the super-rich are doing now, creating a new aristocracy at our expense.
 
ST4 said:
But the forebears made that money, procured the assets to secure the financial well being of their future generations, not the generations of others.
Click to expand...
But is the wealth generation trait heritable? For your argument to work it has to be. Whereas the circumstantial evidence suggests that the offspring of the wealth generators are no more lucky, intelligent, diligent, hard-working or enterprising than anyone else. The circumstantial evidence points to them being less capable of generating new wealth and with an emphasis on illusory conspicuous consumption.

What's the easiest way to become a millionaire? - inherit ten million.. ..
 
Alastair said:
But is the wealth generation trait heritable? For your argument to work it has to be. Whereas the circumstantial evidence suggests that the offspring of the wealth generators are no more lucky, intelligent, diligent, hard-working or enterprising than anyone else. The circumstantial evidence points to them being less capable of generating new wealth and with an emphasis on illusory conspicuous consumption.

What's the easiest way to become a millionaire? - inherit ten million.. ..
Click to expand...

And what's wrong with that. Previous generations have ensured the prosperity off their family descendent, they've paid their taxes in their life, why should they pay it beyond the grave.

Future generations may blow it, but if it's held in trust even the most degenerate of offsprings to come hopefully cannot squander it. Again I see no wrong in that.

Making money is hard, but the hardest bit is conserving it to leave a legacy for those you leave behind. Anyway, with brothers/sisters, grave kids then ten mil would slow half and hslf so by four generations of say 16 great grand kids it's not so much
 
Last edited:
ST4 said:
And what's wrong with that. Previous generations have ensured the prosperity off their family descendent, they've paid their taxes in their life, why should they pay it beyond the grave.

Future generations may blow it, but if it's held in trust even the most degenerate of offsprings to come hopefully cannot squander it. Again I see no wrong in that.

Making money is hard, but the hardest bit is conserving it to leave a legacy for those you leave behind
Click to expand...
Hang on, you're very good a deflecting the argument..

My comments started pointing out your error in equating income inequality with evolutionary theory. You've stopped defending that attitude which I shall interpret as your conceding defeat.
 
Alastair said:
Hang on, you're very good a deflecting the argument..

My comments started pointing out your error in equating income inequality with evolutionary theory. You've stopped defending that attitude which I shall interpret as your conceding defeat.
Click to expand...

Those that can make money and be successful, those that are should I say evolutionary inferior won't.

Those that have money already IMHO are irrelevant, they've been lucky to have successful forebears who've ensured, through their evolutionary superiority, their financial security. They, IMHO are out of the equation.

At my work place, I won't be able to progress beyond a certain level, my mate there maybe. Whether I inherit £2mil and him £20 it doesn't matter, he'll have made more and all things being equal if we inherited the same, he'd be richer. However, life isn't fair. Some are born rich, sine ugly, some physically capable, others not.

Some of these allow us to make money, but if you're born with it it matters less. You're not in the race, you don't need to be.

I still don't get how other folks wealth or poverty relative to me actually effects me. A co worker has a very rich husband, she goes in holidays you'd only dream of, drives around in £70k of car. Doesbt change my life whether she has this and I don't.

If people were happier with what they had, and just accepted how their own limitations physically and mentally will dictate how much they will have or don't have (unless their heir to assets beyond their earning scope) the works would be a better place.

Let's face it, my hands shake and I'm not the sharpest knife in the block, I was never going to be a £300k/yr neurosurgeon etc, but not everyone can be a d should just accept it.
 
ST4 said:
I still don't get how other folks wealth or poverty relative to me actually effects me. A co worker has a very rich husband, she goes in holidays you'd only dream of, drives around in £70k of car. Doesbt change my life whether she has this and I don't.

If people were happier with what they had, and just accepted how their own limitations physically and mentally will dictate how much they will have or don't have (unless their heir to assets beyond their earning scope) the works would be a better place.

Let's face it, my hands shake and I'm not the sharpest knife in the block, I was never going to be a £300k/yr neurosurgeon etc, but not everyone can be a d should just accept it.
Click to expand...
Because you're missing the whole point of income inequality. It's not about the difference of getting a new car or not, or going on holiday twice in a year rather than just once.

And it's not about how it affects you.
 
Alastair said:
Because you're missing the whole point of income inequality. It's not about the difference of getting a new car or not, or going on holiday twice in a year rather than just once.

And it's not about how it affects you.
Click to expand...

Yep, some will struggle to eat bad others will have lobster and caviar.

It's up to those who have to determine, IMHO, how much if any of their wealth they should give up to help others.

Market forces determine more than you think, rich people need to do business and it's a bad business that's full of chiefs and not Indians.
 
Last edited:
ST4 said:
Yep, some will struggle to eat bad others will have lobster and caviar.

It's up to those who have to determine, IMHO, how much if any of their wealth they should give up to help others.

Market forces determine more than you think, rich people need to do business and it's a bad business that's full of chiefs and not Indians.
Click to expand...
What you say would make some sense if it were a 'level playing field' but it isn't unfortunately and it's becoming even more skewed and it's the middle earners who are being screwed all the time.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top