60,000 multimillionaires own 3 times more wealth than half the world’s populationA new report from the World Inequality Lab, the product of four years of comprehensive research, finds that economic inequality on a world scale continues to increase by leaps and bounds, with vast wealth concentrated in a tiny handful of billionaires and centi-millionaires. As the report’s foreword declares: "The data presented here are striking. The richest 10% of the global population own close to three-quarters of all wealth, while the poorest half hold barely 2%. Fewer than 60,000 multi-millionaires now control three times more wealth than half of humanity combined. Within most countries, the bottom 50% rarely possess more than 5% of national wealth. "
The World Inequality Lab was established through efforts to investigate global inequality initially spearheaded by economists Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, co-authors of a series of studies on the concentration of wealth and income. According to the report, the wealthiest 0.001 percent have seen their share of the world’s wealth grow from 4 percent to 6 percent since 1995, while the bottom half of the world’s population controls only 2 percent. Multimillionaires have increased their wealth by approximately 8 percent each year over the past three decades, nearly twice the rate of the bottom half of the population.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/11/rzdx-d11.htmlAn AI-Powered Stock MarketThe stock market is, plainly, no longer simply a concern of the elite. “We like to joke that the markets are not the economy,” Peter Atwater of Financial Insyghts recently told Bloomberg, “but we’ve reached a point now where the economy is the markets.” In past articles, I’ve covered the rise and risks of retail investing for everyday Americans. To recap: a majority of Americans now own stocks; young women are the fastest growing demographic of investors; and the onset of “commission free” trading has lured millions of us into high-risk trading in speculative stocks and the derivatives market. All of this has taken place under the guise of words like access, equality, and democratization. Yet recent weeks has seen a spread of predictions of a bubble — and cracks beginning to show in the consumer economy as well as private cre
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