From left: Jim Walton, Alice Walton, Jim’s wife Lynne McNabb Walton, Rob Walton’s wife Melani Lowman Walton and Rob Walton. PHOTOGRAPH: RICK T. WILKING / STRINGER
The 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet control $1.4 trillion
On August 10, 2019, Tom Metcalf, Andrew Heathcote, Pei Yi Mak, Sophie Alexander, Tom Maloney, Devon Pendleton, Venus Feng, Yoojung Lee, Blake Schmidt, Jack Witzig and Steven Crabbily write on Bloomberg:
The numbers are mind-boggling: $70,000 per minute, $4 million per hour, $100 million per day.
That’s how quickly the fortune of the Waltons, the clan behind Walmart Inc., has been growing since last year’s Bloomberg ranking of the world’s richest families.
At that rate, their wealth would’ve expanded about $23,000 since you began reading this. A new Walmart associate in the U.S. would’ve made about 6 cents in that time, on the way to an $11 hourly minimum.
Even in this era of extreme wealth and brutal inequality, the contrast is jarring. The heirs of Sam Walton, Walmart’s notoriously frugal founder, are amassing wealth on a near-unprecedented scale — and they’re hardly alone.
The Walton fortune has swelled by $39 billion, to $191 billion, since topping the June 2018 ranking of the world’s richest families.
Other American dynasties are close behind in terms of the assets they’ve accrued. The Mars family, of candy fame, added $37 billion, bringing its fortune to $127 billion. The Kochs, the industrialists-cum-political-power-players, tacked on $26 billion, to $125 billion.
So it goes around the globe. America’s richest 0.1% today control more wealth than at any time since 1929, but their counterparts in Asia and Europe are gaining too. Worldwide, the 25 richest families now control almost $1.4 trillion in wealth, up 24% from last year.
To some critics, such figures are evidence that capitalism needs fixing. Inequality has become an explosive political issue, from Paris to Seattle to Hong Kong. But how to shrink the growing gap between the rich and the poor?
As the tension increases, even some billionaire heirs are backing steps such as wealth taxes.
“If we don’t do something like this, what are we doing, just hoarding this wealth in a country that’s falling apart at the seams?” Liesel Pritzker Simmons, whose family ranks 17th on the Bloomberg list, said in June. “That’s not the America we want to live in.”
A notable addition this year: the Saudi royal family.
The House of Saud is worth $100 billion, based on the cumulative payouts royal family members are estimated to have received over the past 50 years from the Royal Diwan, the executive office of the king.
That’s a lowball figure. After all, oil giant Saudi Aramco, the linchpin of the Saudi economy, is the world’s most profitable company. The kingdom is hoping to take it public at a $2 trillion valuation.
Tallying dynastic dollars isn’t an exact science. Fortunes backed by decades and sometimes centuries of assets and dividends can obfuscate the true extent of a family’s holdings. The net worth of the Rothschilds or Rockefellers, for instance, is too diffuse to value. Clans whose wealth is currently unverifiable are also absent.
But of those we can track, most are reaping the rewards of ultra-low interest rates, tax cuts, deregulation and innovation. Koch Industries, for instance, has a venture-capital arm. The latest generation of Waltons is establishing its own enterprises.
Other big gainers include the owners of fashion house Chanel and Italy’s Ferrero family, whose brands include Nutella spread and Tic Tac mints. In India, the fortune of the Ambani family swelled $7 billion, to $50 billion.
In all, the world’s 25 richest families have $250 billion more wealth, compared to last year.
The rich aren’t necessarily getting richer together. The Quandt family dropped eight places following a poor year for Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, which has battled trade tensions and slowing global markets as BMW invests in the disruptive shift to self-driving electric vehicles. The Dassault, Duncan, Lee and Hearst families all fell from the list.
And this could in many ways represent a peak, as U.S. President Donald Trump escalates a trade war with China and worries grow about a global recession.
“It can be very challenging to preserve wealth over the long-term,” said Rebecca Gooch, research director at Campden Wealth, a network and education business for generational-wealth holders. “Family-owned operating businesses can shift from booming to declining, a family’s investment portfolio might not be well diversified or there can be issues with generational transitions.”
Methodology
Net worth figures are as of July 19, 2019. The ranking excludes first-generation fortunes and those fortunes controlled by a single heir. Clans whose source of wealth is too diffuse or opaque to be valued are also excluded.
See article for listing of 25 families.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/richest-families-in-the-world/
Gary Reber Comments:
This article is all about the concentrated ownership of wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital assets owned by a tiny few.
If you haven’t figured it out already, these billionaire individuals and families are wealthy because they OWN productive, wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets, acquired through a system that requires past savings in order to take the risk to invest.
The solution should be obvious. That is to empower EVERY child, woman, and man to acquire personal ownership stakes in the productive capital assets formed in the future economy, without the requirement of past savings and without having to be subject to personal financial risk. This solution is the essence of the proposed Capital Homestead Act, a modern-day Homestead Act, but instead of land ownership it is the non-human productive capital assets that are the primary means applied to producing goods, products, and services.
We need to turn our country around a face up to the devastating effects of outsourcing our productive capabilities.
We are in a battle with Communist China, Communist Vietnam, and other low-cost production countries, who are determined, particularly China, to be the producers of consumer goods and products and the supply chain producers for the world. American corporations have joined them to expand their profits and the American people have supported this productive transition to China by buying the products produced there. This needs to stop or America will be drained of our capabilities to produce ourselves. And will be disastrous and result in widespread upheaval.
And that is why we are all wearing Chinese-made clothes and cooking on Chinese-made appliances, shoes, computers, phones,and are dependent on all manner of parts that show up in automobiles, and the list goes on and on, etc. etc. And if not in China they will be made in some other low-cost country.
American corporations and other developed countries corporations took advantage of the low-labor and non-regulated opportunities the Chinese Communist government provided as long as the Chinese would have at least 51 percent ownership with the American corporation partnering with a Chinese firm. Then the situation is shared “stolen” technology. This occurred over time, within a couple or three decades. A few first began to outsource, and then other followed outsourcing to stay competitive, resulting in millions of jobs outsourced. Not only with respect to manufactured goods and products, but also services. All this time our governments did nothing to penalize outsourcing and putting tariffs on goods and products entering the U.S. made in China. And of course, Walmart became China’s biggest distributor of consumer products and is now the biggest employer in the U.S. While there are still jobs available in the U.S. but for less wages, with less hours, no benefits, and little to no job security. Contrary to the popular notion, there is inevitably a long line of applicants for even the lowest-paying jobs. People are desperate for jobs, as there’s nothing to fall back on today. We have an abundant supply of job-ready people who are desperate for any job at any wage. Employers no longer need to pay more, in order to get enough qualified workers. Too many Americans today are forced to work two or three jobs to survive. Minimum wages legislation is only a band-aid; it is not the solution to economic inequality.
Deterring China from becoming the world’s producer is the real battle we must win. China is determined to win or the hundreds of millions that left their agricultural roots to take jobs in the cities will have no job and no alternatives unless they do what we must do. The only way to fight this trend and be competitive with China is to automate and extensively use technological robotics and AI to produce more efficiency and as much as possible the goods and products wanted and needed by our own people. So the impact of all this is the American worker either lost or is losing his or her job due to outsourcing or they lose their job to automation, which they do not own. Disaster is here now and will get worse as tectonic shifts in the technologies of production intensifies, and we are not planning for this future. The central question is Who should own this future?
So, to me anyone advocating for outsourcing is not acting in the best interests of the American people. And not putting forth solutions is not taking responsibility.
The solution is to enact the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/ as well as supporting Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
