Billionaires Rule the Globe
There is nothing wrong with billionaires becoming
billionaires and even wealthier if they were to produce products and services raising
the living standard. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened
enough. The corporate shareholding structures and the global mutual harmonizing
interest of billionaires prevents it.
They interact in identical fashion by investing in Wall Street, the London
stock market or the emerging NEOM in Saudi Arabia. Over the years, they have become conditioned
and seemingly addicted to rapid profits extractable out of stock markets.
In fact, in many ways, the global corporate
shareholding structures are the economic deformation that divert billionaires
from raising the living standard. It is terrifically easy for them to
profit from buying and selling corporations, trading shares, benefiting from
insider knowledge and short term rapid profits. Long term, decentralized
initiated investments which raise the living standard are of little attractions
to them.
As the global financial structure is playing out, it
keeps the living standard from rising as much as it could if the structure were
reformed. Beyond this, the structure
exhibits strange co-operations. Chinese
Communist billionaires are co-operating and happily investing and profiteering
in western stock markets and capitalistic western corporations. Arab billionaires are intensely interacting
with pro-Israeli billionaires and are mutually profiteering while their people
are locked into a seemingly never ending confrontation. Cynics can emit a loud psychocathartic: ah,
the ironies of history.
Examples of co-operating and mutually backscratching
billionaires are plenty. It emerges more
and more that billionaires Trump and Putin co-operated. Both are transnational, globally investing
billionaires, yet both pretend to be nationalists. Las Vegas billionaires Sheldon Adelson and
Steve Wynn donate to billionaire politicians.
Adelson was a top contributor to the recent campaign, and Wynn is the
head of the Republican National Committee finance committee. Often opposing them politically is
billionaire George Soros.
Globally, Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Latin American
billionaires are heavily investing in Wall Street and the London stock
exchanges and in untold corporate and other investments. Nearly all resent national boundaries and/or
regulations restraining their rapid investments and profiteering that is mostly
devoid of benefiting the people. Some
have citizenships of several nations and tax havens spread globally to no end.
Many of them are even exhibiting symptoms of the fact
that there is no honor among thieves.
Trump and Putin, seemingly on very friendly terms earlier, are now
estranged. A Saudi billionaire playboy
and heavy investor in Blankfein’s Citigroup, Lyft, Twitter and lots of western
fancy hotels has been arrested for fraud by Saudi’s King. He bonded investing with billionaires Murdoch,
Bloomberg et al. in spite of the people of their societies being locked into a
severe seemingly never ending diplomatic/military confrontation line. The question arises if societies’ wealthiest
people can co-operate, why can’t their people and their governments?
Meanwhile, wealthy Chinese and Saudis, having tasted
the offerings of rapid massive profits through stock speculation, are expanding
efforts to enlarge their financial markets.
Saudi Arabia is planning the so-called NEOM free economic zone, a 500
billion dollar project. It would have
few regulations with drone services and driverless cars and presumably becoming
a hub for global investment. No doubt if
the Saudi state owned oil company offers its initial public offering to the world
in NEOM, it would give Wall Street and London massive competition. No surprise that Trump recently urged the
Saudis to list its oil company on Wall Street.
The solution to unproductive investments by
billionaires is actually quite simple.
Taxing less those investments which raise the living standard and taxing
heavily unproductive ventures could easily be enacted. A partial decentralization of all stock
markets around the globe would definitely be beneficial for the people. It would retain investment money regionally
and locally where the results can be seen and enjoyed literally by the people. It would spread wealth far more uniformly
across all economies instead of concentrating it into the hands of the few. As it is, the political will for this is still
missing and may not emerge until some overwhelming event, so history proves too
often. The current disclosure of the
Paradise Papers showing global tax havens is unlikely to evoke necessary
reforms. The fact that billionaire
Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, is co-operating investing with billionaire
Putin’s family is also likely to be insufficient to evoke long overdue reforms.
So the globe’s population will have to wait for the
sine qua non reforms to serve the living standard and not the top 0.001
percent.