The CNN Business reporter Clare Duffy writes that the COVID-19 pandemic could push 150 million more people worldwide into ‘extreme poverty’. Quoting a recently released World Bank report, Duffy writes “an additional 88 to 115 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, in 2020 because of the pandemic and resulting economic recession.”

According to the World Bank reports, the US, Brazil, and Mexico have the highest income and wealth inequality in the World. In the MarketWatch, a columnist (and a professor of sustainable development, and health policy and management at Columbia University) Jeffrey D. Sachs writes that such higher inequality “leads to lower social cohesion, less social trust and more political polarization and significantly increasing vulnerability to COVID-19 deaths”.

Global extreme poverty is expected to rise in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years as the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic compounds the forces of conflict and climate change, which were already slowing poverty reduction progress. [..] The deceleration in economic activity intensified by the pandemic is likely to hit the poorest people especially hard.

The World Bank Report (source: CNN)

• Billionaires have never been richer despite the pandemic
• Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. has fueled COVID-19 deaths
• Billionaires’ wealth rises to $10.2 trillion amid Covid crisis

Billionaires’ Wealth Rises

The CNN Business reporter Hanna Ziady, referencing a report from Swiss bank UBS and PwC, writes that the world’s billionaires wealth increased to a record $10.2 trillion at the end of July. “Some billionaires are getting richer much faster than others, however. The pandemic has accelerated a growing divergence in wealth between innovators in technology, healthcare and industry, and entrepreneurs in areas such as entertainment, financial services and real estate”.

According another report from the Institute for Policy Studies, cited in the CNN Business, found that “over the past two decades the growth in US billionaire wealth has been 200 times greater than the growth in median wealth”.

“The 643 wealthiest Americans, including entrepreneurs such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk, raked in $845 billion in combined assets between March and September, growing their wealth by nearly a third”.

In the Guardian,Wealth correspondent Rupert Neate writes, referencing a Swiss bank UBS report, “billionaires had mostly benefited from betting on the recovery of global stock markets when they were at their nadir during the global lockdowns in March and April. UBS said billionaires’ wealth had hit ‘a new high, surpassing the previous peak of $8.9tn reached at the end of 2017‘. The number of billionaires has also hit a new high of 2,189, up from 2,158 in 2017″.

Billionaires did extremely well during the Covid crisis, not only [did] they ride the storm to the downside, but also gained up on the upside [as stock markets rebounded]. [..] Billionaires typically have “significant risk appetite” and were confident to gamble some of their considerable fortunes.

Josef Stadler, the head of UBS’s global family office department (source: The Guardian)

“The world’s current super-rich people hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, when families such as the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast fortunes,” according to the Guardian.