Kabul’s markets full of food, but no-one has money
Kabul’s markets full of food, but no-one has money – BBC News
North Sea Boom
BP boss Bernard Looney said the oil and gas giant had become a “cash machine” with bumper shareholder payouts, soaring profits, booming asset valuations.
North Sea oil and gas companies are expected to report near-record cashflows of almost $20bn (£14.9bn) for the current financial year. Wholesale gas prices have soared in Europe and the UK. Gas has risen as much as tenfold to new all-time highs.
Shell, the world’s largest producer and trader of liquefied natural gas (LNG), said last week that profits would be higher than expected thanks to the elevated prices. Unlike gas that arrives via pipelines from fields in the North Sea, LNG is shipped across oceans to the highest bidder, meaning companies like Shell benefit from surging global prices.
Shell was already planning to hand investors a $7bn bonus by offering to buy shares back from them, but has now said this will happen “at pace”.
The largest North Sea explorer Harbour Energy, expected “materially higher free cashflow at current commodity prices” and announced a $200m-a-year (£147m) dividend for investors.
Rising oil prices have been good news for chemical group Ineos, which is owned by Monaco-based British multi-billionaire Jim Racliffe. Revenues increased by 87%, or €2.4bn, to €5.1bn in the three-month period ending on 30 September 2021.
Ithaca, owned by the Israeli group Delek, said rising prices meant gas revenue per barrel from its North Sea assets, which include the Alba and Alder gas fields, nearly doubled in the third quarter, from $49 last year to $97. As it boosted production to meet demand and cash in on strong prices, revenues from gas more than tripled from $59m to $180m over the three-month period.
Calls for windfall tax as North Sea oil and gas profits soar | Oil and gas companies | The Guardian
From bad to worse
Tax hikes and soaring bills will deliver the biggest shock to household incomes for almost half a century.
A person earning £30,000 will see their take-home pay plunge by £1,660 thanks to soaring living costs, stagnant wages and tax increases, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
The effective pay cut includes paying £250 more in national insurance contributions and £150 more in income tax. Poorer households, which spend more of their incomes on essentials like energy, will be hit even harder, with hundreds of thousands expected to fall into fuel poverty. Someone earning £15,000 a year will take an £860 hit to their real income after tax.
Citizens Advice warned people were being forced to make “desperate decisions” between eating or heating their homes. “…things are set to go from bad to worse…”
George Dibb, head of the IPPR’s Centre for Economic Justice, explained, “The UK is facing a sustained cost of living crisis where incomes could be hit even harder than the financial crash of 2008. If this proves to be the case you have to look back as far as the 1970s to find a worse shock to households’ real disposable income.”
Households were already approaching the current crisis in a financially vulnerable position due to 13 years without a real increase in average earnings, said Frank van Lerven of the New Economics Foundation.
According to the NEF, some 21.4 million people are living below a socially acceptable living standard. The think tank does not expect real wages to recover to their 2008 level until the end of 2028.
Sunak’s tax hikes may deepen UK’s cost-of-living crisis, experts warn | The Independent
Fact of the Day
Over the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries.
That is an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years.
The new Airpower Summary data reveal that the United States has dropped another 3,246 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria (2,068 under Trump and 1,178 under Biden) since February 2020.
UK Wealth Inequality
The richest 1% of households in the UK each have fortunes of at least £3.6m.
At the other end of the scale, the poorest 10% of households have just £15,400 or less, with almost half burdened with more debts than they had in assets.
The wealthiest 10% of households held 43% of all the wealth in Great Britain in the latest period; in comparison, the bottom 50% held only 9%.
Figures that show the inequality gap was widening even before the pandemic struck.
The income inequality gap as measured by the Gini coefficient had “steadily increased to 36.3%” (A Gini coefficient of 0% represents total equality where everyone has the same and 100% represents total inequality, where one person owns all the wealth.)
“The gap between the richest in society and the rest of the population has widened over the 10-year period,” the ONS said.
There are an estimated 27.8m households in the UK and there are just 263,000 in the top 1%.
The median average household wealth across the UK was £302,500, only a marginal increase on previous years.
Richest 1% of UK households are worth at least £3.6m each | Money | The Guardian
Kasakhstan Upheaval and Unrest
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kazakhstan’s authoritarian leader has ordered security forces to “fire without warning”. He also said “20,000 bandits” had attacked the city of Almaty, the epicentre of protests sparked by a fuel price rise and blamed foreign-trained “terrorists”.
Tokayev dismissed calls to hold talks with protesters as “nonsense”, saying: “What kind of talks can we hold with criminals and murderers?” Tokayev gave “special thanks” to Putin for sending troops.
Unrest began when the cost of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) – which many people in Kazakhstan use to fuel their cars – doubled. But protests been prompted as a result of long-simmering frustrations with the political and economic situation in the country. It has turned into a general protest against corruption, poverty and inequality.
CEOs fat-cats get the cream
The bosses of Britain’s biggest companies will have made more money in 2022 by breakfast time on Friday than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year.
By 9am on 7 January, the fourth working day of the year, a FTSE 100 chief executive will have been paid more on an hourly basis than the UK worker’s annual salary, based on median average remuneration figures for both groups.
FTSE 100 chief executives were paid £2.7m on average in 2020 (the latest full-year figures available), which works out at 86 times the £31,285 average salary for full-time UK workers.
Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company that makes the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine, was the highest paid, receiving £15.5m. The other top earners were Experian’s Brian Cassin, who got £10.3m, CRH’s Albert Manifold, with £10m, and Berkeley’s Rob Perrins, who collected £8m.
Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said: “The pandemic has shown us all who keeps the country going during a crisis. There are millions of hardworking people in Britain – from carers, to delivery drivers, to shop floor staff – who give more than they get back, but greedy executives are taking home millions while ordinary workers face yet another year of pay squeezes.”
The Unite union’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, said: “Is it the nurse in an intensive care unit saving the lives of those struck by Covid, or an elite investment banker making millions, who contributes most to society? Which of them stood up for all of us during the pandemic?”
Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB union, said, “Fat cat bosses trousering 173 times more than the carers who look after our loved ones is a disgrace.”
Apple’s Cook
Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, was paid nearly $100m (£74m) last year, a 570% increase on the previous year.
Cook also gained access to share awards worth about $750m as the iPhone maker’s market value approaches $3tn.
His total compensation for the year to September 2021 was $98.7m, up from $14.7m the previous year.
His 2021 pay was boosted by a $82.3m stock award bonus related to Apples’ soaring share price. His base salary was $3m, he also collected $12m in bonuses.
Cook’s pay was 1,447 times that paid to the average Apple employee, who collected a median average of $68,254.
Apple spent more than $700,000 on private flights for Cook, as the company has decided it is too much of a security risk to allow him to fly on scheduled commercial flights.
The company also paid hundreds of thousands in personal security, pension contributions, life insurance and buying back unused holiday time.
Cook’s personal fortune is more than $1bn
Apple boss Tim Cook was paid nearly $100m last year, filings show | Tim Cook | The Guardian
If Apple was a country
Billionaire Bonanza
The nearly 750 billionaires in the United States saw their combined wealth soar by $1 trillion in 2021, a 25% jump.
Elon Musk led the billionaire pandemic profiteers with $118.2 billion in wealth gains last year, a 77% increase from 2020.
Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, meanwhile, saw their net worths grow by $1.4 billion and $18.3 billion, respectively.
U.S. billionaires now collectively own $5.1 trillion in wealth.
The bottom 50% of the U.S. population combined owns $3.4 trillion in wealth.
Under current law, the billionaires’ massive windfalls in 2021 will go untaxed because they consist of unrealized capital gains.