What keeps you awake at night?
At least Amazon’s purchase of the Rivian sustainable transport company may protect you from vehicle noise at night.
Apart from dogs, neighbours and noisy cars of course. Johnny and Juliet Kipps have now arrived in St Lucia after a great trip across the Atlantic. It gave them time to contemplate some of the bigger issues facing the world: for instance the rich grow richer and the poor not only poorer but more numerous and more needy. Just this divide resulted in the French revolution 233 years ago. No need to man the barricades today: just the smart phones. In 2021 billionaires saw the steepest increase in their share of wealth on record, according to The World Inequality Lab’s annual report, a story carried by Forbes in December last year.
Inequality threatens the world
The top 0.01% richest individuals—the 520,000 people who have at least $19 million— now hold 11% of the world’s wealth, up a full percentage point from 2020, the report found. Meanwhile, the share of global wealth owned by billionaires has grown from 1% in 1995 to 3% in 2021.
“Since wealth is a major source of future economic gains, and increasingly, of power and influence, this presages further increases in inequality,” economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who won a 2019 Nobel prize for their research on poverty, wrote in the introduction of the report. We are living in a world with an “extreme concentration of economic power in the hands of a very small minority of the super-rich,” they said.
At the same time, inequality has also grown, particularly in countries without strong social welfare nets. The top 1% have grabbed 38% of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, while the bottom 50% captured just 2% of it, the report found.
Bezos: $20b richer, Zuckerberg: $31b poorer this week
Two of the mega-riches’ fortunes changed dramatically last week. Jeff Bezos added $20 billion to his personal wealth on the back of better than expected results from Amazon, whose profit nearly doubled in the critical holiday period, as the company managed to control labour and supply costs better than expected and saw gains in its cloud-computing and advertising businesses. The company saw a huge boost in the quarter from its investment in electric-vehicle maker Rivian Automotive Inc. That added nearly $12 billion in profits, accounting for the majority of its earnings for the quarter.
Several of the world’s biggest technology companies struggled Thursday, a signal that the tech boom that powered the U.S. stock market and some of the country’s economic resilience in recent years is coming under pressure. While many saw their shares rise after reporting strong sales and earnings growth in the fourth quarter, others fell precipitously in the face of a labour shortage, changes in advertising markets and inflation pressure.
Meta Platform’s stock fell by 26,4% on Thursday, losing £169b
Meta Platforms Inc. (formerly known as Facebook Inc.) reported a decline in its user base and said its advertising business had been hit hard by Apple’s new privacy measures. Meta’s shares fell by more than 20%, a record daily loss for a US firm, and shares of PayPal Holdings Inc. and Spotify Technology SA fell by similar amounts. Spotify’s decline was caused by its continued support of Joe Rogan’s blog, which has more followers than any news feed, and whose controversial Covid content resulted in artists like Neil Young and Jodi Mitchell leaving the platform. Free speech comes at a price.
TikTok overtakes Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat
Meta also warned of slowing revenue growth in the face of competition from rival platforms including TikTok and YouTube, while advertisers were also cutting spending, according to a BBC report. Mr Zuckerberg said the firm’s sales growth had been hurt as audiences, especially younger users, had left for rivals.
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