by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
This Is London, City of (Eighty) Billionaires
The collective net worth of Britain’s wealthiest one percent has doubled since the financial crisis of 2008.
That news – reported laconically over the weekend in a business story on the Guardian’s UK home page – is an astonishing flat-world counterpart to the news of the earthquake that struck Nepal.
How on quaking earth has the net worth of Britain’s wealthiest one percent doubled in six years? Through use of the same investment mechanisms that the financial crisis brought to light, I’d bet. Because how else? There hasn’t been any remarkable new commercial enterprise – like railroads in the middle of the nineteenth century, computing and the Internet at the end of the twentieth – that would have produced such an upswell in wealth. There hasn’t been an annexing of new territory, as happened after the Spanish-American War, or an opening of formerly closed markets as happened post-1989. There hasn’t been a regime change, a revaluation of the currency, or a profound restructuring of the tax system – all ways in which rich people have doubled their money in other times and places. The UK economy hasn’t been spectacularly successful – or even notably more successful than that of its obvious counterparts, as far as I can tell. Nor as far as I know has there been a single phenomenally successful Briton – a J.K. Rowling, like, say, the Beatles before her – who earned so much money so quickly that her success boosted all the superwealthy.
No, it’s probably just the case that for the wealthiest one percent, the doubling of one’s net worth in six years is the new normal, a simple matter of people engaging other people to make their money work for them. And the “financial crisis”: that wasn’t a crisis. That was actually a soft opening for the global financial system’s current production (“Bigger and Better Than Ever”) – a chance for the people who run things to work out the kinks in the production and gain a few extra accommodations from their friends in government before the actual opening, which is what we are now in.