I pulled this eye-popping bit out of a recent article in The Globalist on the ultra-wealthy in the world of soccer team ownership:
Large fortunes today are really, really large. The top ten billionaires on the Forbes list have the combined net worth of over half a trillion dollars.
To get into the ranks of the world’s top 500 billionaires, you now need $3.3 billion. Back in 2000, the top ten were worth just $280 billion, half as much as today’s bunch, and there were only 322 billionaires in the entire world total. While the fortunes of the super-rich doubled, the average household income in the UK, for example, went up by just one third.
Plutocrats have become a new global ruling class. They live in an effectively borderless world, socialize with other rich people around the globe, keep their fortunes in low-tax havens and influence the political process in their own countries in such a manner that they pay little or no taxes.
