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0 pointssgjohnson3y ago0 comments

Looking at the total world population is completely meaningless. This is because fertility rate in virtually every developed country is below 2, however there are extremely poor countries where the population is exploding with fertility rates above 8.

> To put it another way, as of 2010, 388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined—about 3.5 billion people; today Oxfam estimates that number as 26.

This is also completely meaningless, because that figure is largely imaginery and super illiquid. Rest assured, Jeff Bezos can't cash out of Amazon and expect to be paid the current market rate for all of his shares.

It's also completely meaningless because the world's bottom 3.5 billion people control virtually no wealth whatsoever. Makes for a good headline though

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bmitc3y ago

For the U.S. alone, I think the stat is something like out of every 10,000 people, it's something ridiculous like either 40 or even 4 people that own as much wealth as the bottom 6,000 combined. It may honestly be something worse like 1. I remember calculating this from a research paper I read, and I feel like 10,000 was the sample population needed to get a non-fractional rich person or persons. This is absurd.

greedo3y ago

Bezos may not be able to sell his shares in significant amounts, but he can sure use them for collateral. This is a very basic strategy for the super rich...

prottog3y ago

It'll be interesting to see if that strategy continues to work in a rising-rates environment, where the value of AMZN or TSLA may not be infinitely appreciating.

mrep3y ago

It's even worse that that. As interest rates rise, equities generally fall as they have been as they need to compete with interest bearing assets so their costs are skyrocketing and their collateral is collapsing risking them for a margin call and loosing everything.

sgjohnsonOP3y ago

Yes, I mentioned it above. There’s no way of stopping it, because the modern financial system is extremely dependent on such collaterization.

Bezos uses it to spend his pile of money, but for one Bezos there are 100 businesses who use the same exact instrument as a perfectly legitimate way to borrow money.

It’ll be extremely hard to draw the line between both use cases in a way Bezos couldn’t exploit it.

rightbyte3y ago

Accumulated spending should be a better measurement than current wealth. Otherwise those with debt has negative wealth.

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