This month Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund, an investor in low-wage employers including Walmart and KFC, and a man worth about $18bn according to Forbes, became the latest in a bank of billionaires to go public about his fears of widening income inequality. [...]
So dire has the situation become that Schwarzman called for a Marshall plan – referencing the US initiative that aided the rebuilding of western Europe after the second world war – to help rebuild the middle class. Admittedly he couldn’t quite use the word “inequality” (that might suggest something was unfair), preferring to argue the real problem was that those not in his wealth bracket were suffering from “income insufficiency”. [...]
Now, he worries generations of children are being left behind. “Today, the wealth of the top 1% of the population is more than that of the bottom 90% of the population combined, which is the same sort of wealth gap that existed during the 1935-40 period (a period that brought in an era of great internal and external conflicts for most countries),” he wrote before going on to dissect how this gap hits poor people’s health, education and opportunities.
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