The 10 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have added roughly $1 billion to their collective fortune every day—or around $12,600 per second—since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
The combined net worth of the 10 richest people in the U.S. has more than doubled since March 2020, reaching $1.35 trillion this week.
An analysis covering more than 200 countries and territories published in The Lancet says antimicrobial resistance (AMR).is killing more people than HIV/Aids or malaria. Many hundreds of thousands of deaths are occurring due to common, previously treatable infections because bacteria that cause them have become resistant to treatment.
It has become a leading cause of death worldwide and is killing about 3,500 people every day. More than 1.2 million – and potentially millions more – died in 2019 as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. In the western Europe region, which includes the UK, more than 51,000 people died as a direct result of AMR.HIV/Aids and malaria have been estimated to have caused 860,000 and 640,000 deaths, respectively, in 2019.
“These new data reveal the true scale of antimicrobial resistance worldwide, and are a clear signal that we must act now to combat the threat,” said the report’s co-author Prof Chris Murray, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
The new Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (Gram) report estimates deaths linked to 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations across 204 countries and territories in 2019 using more than 470m individual records.
Regionally, deaths caused directly by AMR were estimated to be highest in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, at 24 deaths per 100,000 population and 22 deaths per 100,000 population respectively. In high-income countries, AMR led directly to 13 deaths per 100,000 and was associated with 56 deaths per 100,000.
Tim Jinks, the head of the drug-resistant infections programme at Wellcome Trust, said, “Like Covid-19, we know what needs to be done to address AMR, but we must now come together with a sense of urgency and global solidarity if we are to be successful.”
The common prosperity we desire is not egalitarianism,” China’s president Xi told delegates. “We will first make the pie bigger and then divide it properly through reasonable institutional arrangements. As a rising tide lifts all boats, everyone will get a fair share from development, and development gains will benefit all our people in a more substantial and equitable way.”
He continued to say that the country is still open to investment from overseas.
“All types of capital are welcome to operate in China, in compliance with laws and regulations, and play a positive role for the development of a country,” he said.
China’s Xi Jinping defends ‘common prosperity’ crackdowns – BBC News
Britain’s “porous” safety net has left the poorest households inadequately protected against major economic disruption, in a major report, the Resolution Foundation claimed.
A “weak” welfare system is “almost unrecognisable” to that created in the aftermath of the Second World War and William Beveridge’s seminal report.
It warns that cuts to cost-based benefits since 2010 “mean Britain goes into the 2020s with a porous safety net that leaves too many in poverty and offers little, and highly variable, insurance for workers whose jobs are affected by economic change”.
The authors of the report highlight that government’s “extra spending has not been driven by more generous income support, which has consistently fallen further behind average earrings.”
Unemployment support is set to “fall to its lowest real-terms values in just over three decades this April, at just £77.29 a week”.
Karl Handscomb, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said:
“Our social security system has seen huge change over the last 75 years, leaving us with a benefits system that makes little attempt to provide basic levels of income support, but doing more to support households with specific costs like housing and children.
“With even those cost-related benefits cut back over the past decade, we go into the 2020s with a porous safety net.
He added: “The result is the poorest members of society are being left further behind, while many are left with little by way of insurance if their jobs are threatened by economic change. These flaws were exposed on the eve of the pandemic, and forced the Chancellor to radically reinvent our welfare system at very short notice.”
Alex Beer, programme head at the Nuffield Foundation, added: “As this research shows, over time the protection given to people who lose their jobs has fallen to a level that only just enables them to avoid destitution and that is damaging not only to the people affected but also to the ability of our society to respond to economic change.”
Arthur Draws the Sword from the Stone
(Or, the labour theory of value)
Arthur quarried and gathered the dun stone,
Felled the oak and beech for his charcoal pit,
Fashioned a furnace by hand and fired it,
Then loaded ore into its clay-bound cone
To smelt and run out the molten iron
Into the rough casting modelled in sand,
Cooling into the form for what he planned.
Still brittle then, much remained to be done:
Heat and hammer, heat and hammer to force
Imperfections out, shaping, tempering
And honing until, with blade appearing,
Pommel and guard gilded and fixed, the course
Of manufacture was complete. From stone
By Arthur, king of his craft, the sword was drawn.
D. A.
Goldman Sachs paid its 43,900 bankers more than $17bn (£12.5bn) last year, a 33% increase on 2020 as the investment bank celebrated a more than doubling of pre-tax profits to $27bn thanks to frenzied dealmaking on both sides of the Atlantic.
The pay and bonuses increase works out at about $403,000 for each employee on average, up from about $328,000 a year ago.
About 400 leading bosses – or the top 1% of the firm – are expected to receive a special one-off pandemic bonus in recognition of the bank’s success during the coronavirus crisis. The bonuses for this elite group are expected to range from the low single digit million to tens of millions of dollars, according to Bloomberg sources.
David Solomon, Goldman’s chief executive, collected total pay of $17.5m in 2020, compared with $27.5m in 2019.
Last summer Goldman increased pay for its junior bankers after they complained about “inhumane” working conditions and 100-hour weeks.
The pay of first-year analysts, who previously received close to $70,000 in base pay, increased to $110,000 before bonuses. Second-year analysts saw their pay rise to $125,000.
Pay for workers in Britain has fallen in real terms.
Average wages, after taking account of inflation, dropped in November for the first time since July 2020
The Office for National Statistics said although average total earnings grew at an annual rate of 3.5% in November, the impact from soaring rates of inflation meant workers suffered a real-terms cut in their pay packets. The official rate of inflation reached a 10-year high of 5.1% in November, effectively meaning a 1.6% cut in pay.
While total pay including bonuses edged up 0.4 percentage points to 4.2% on the previous month, without bonuses pay remained static. Once inflation was taken into account wages went into reverse in real terms, declining by 0.9%, even when bonuses are included.
The Resolution Foundation thinktank said this squeeze on pay was the third in a decade, after real wage falls after the financial crisis between 2011 and 2014 and in the year after the 2016 Brexit vote.
Hannah Slaughter, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said, “Despite widespread talk of returning wage spirals, Britain is instead experiencing the return of shrinking pay packets,” she said. “The latest period of falling real wages – the third in a decade – is likely to have started as a far back as last summer, and is likely to continue beyond next summer too.”
Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said, “Working people deserve a decent standard of living and a wage they can raise a family on. But instead, following the worse pay squeeze for two centuries, real pay is falling, and they now face a cost-of-living crisis,” she said.
UK workers’ pay rises fall behind inflation amid cost-of-living crisis | Economics | The Guardian
The number of households suffering from “fuel stress” – those spending at least 10% of their family budgets on energy bills – is set to treble to 6.3m overnight when the new energy price cap comes in on 1 April.
Fuel stress will no longer be confined to the poorest households, according to a study by the Resolution Foundation. Low- and middle-income families will also find it hard to cope as they spend a far greater share of their family budget on these essentials than higher earners.
9% of English households are currently experiencing fuel stress, an indicator of finding energy bills unaffordable and also the definition of fuel poverty in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. That figure is expected to leap to 27% when the energy price cap rises to about £2,000 a year in April, an increase of more than 50%.
Levels of fuel stress are expected to be highest in the north-east and the West Midlands (33% and 32% respectively), among pensioner households (38%), among those living in local authority housing (35%) and those in poorly insulated homes (69% of families in homes with an energy performance certificate F-rating).
Jonny Marshall, senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “Fuel stress levels are particularly high among pensioner households and those in poorly insulated homes – a stark reminder of the need to modernise Britain’s leaky housing stock and curb national dependency on gas for power and heating.”
UK households facing ‘fuel stress’ will treble to 6.3m – thinktank | Energy bills | The Guardian
Continuing this blog’s debunking of the claims that we are an over-populated planet and too many people will be an obstacle to achieving a sustainable socialist society, China’s birth rate dropped to a record low of 7.52 per 1,000 people in 2021, National Bureau of Statistics data showed an accelerating downward trend that led Beijing last year to begin allowing couples to have up to three children.
The birth rate was the lowest since 1949 when the statistics bureau began collating the data.
The natural growth rate of China’s population, which excludes migration, was only 0.034 percent for 2021, the lowest since 1960.
Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset management, explained, “This suggests China’s total population may have reached its peak in 2021. It also indicates China’s potential growth is likely slowing faster than expected.”
There were 10.62 million births in 2021, the data showed, compared with 12 million in 2020. The birth rate in 2020 was 8.52 births per 1,000 people.
China’s birth rate drops to record low | Business and Economy News | Al Jazeera
The pandemic has made the world’s wealthiest richer but has led to more people living in poverty, according to the charity Oxfam. The world’s 10 richest men have more than doubled their collective fortunes since March 2020
However, lower incomes for the world’s poorest contributed to the death of 21,000 people each day. Oxfam’s report, which was also based on data from the World Bank, said a lack of access to healthcare, hunger, gender-based violence and climate breakdown contributed to one death every four seconds.
“This year, what’s happening is off the scale,” Danny Sriskandarajah, Oxfam GB’s chief executive, said. “There’s been a new billionaire created almost every day during this pandemic, meanwhile 99% of the world’s population are worse off because of lockdowns, lower international trade, less international tourism, and as a result of that, 160 million more people have been pushed into poverty.”
He added, “Something is deeply flawed with our economic system,” he added. “Even during a global crisis our unfair economic systems manage to deliver eye-watering windfalls for the wealthiest but fail to protect the poorest,”
The world’s 10 richest men are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and family, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffet.
While collectively their wealth grew from $700bn to $1.5tn, there is significant variation between them, with Musk’s fortune growing by more than 1,000%, while Gates’ rose by a more modest 30%.
Wealth of world’s 10 richest men doubled in pandemic, Oxfam says – BBC News