Thanks to Donalds handouts, 2020 was a year to celebrate for the ultra rich , and they will do well in 2021 also.
On the eve of the passage of the new $1.9 trillion stimulus package, there is no indication that this policy is going to change with Democratic President Joe Biden in the White House.A wonderful year for the elite: Top 25 hedge fund managers earned record $32 billion in 2020 as millions plunged into misery
In “The 20th Annual Rich List, the Definitive Ranking of What Hedge Fund Managers Earned in 2020,” Stephen Taub wrote, “A bad year for humanity was a wonderful year for the hedge fund elite.”
Topping the list was Israel (Izzy) Englander, the founder and CEO of Millennium Management , who earned $3.8 billion in 2020. Englander, 72, more than doubled his 2019 earnings of $1.5 billion and has a net worth of $7.2 billion and is 74th richest American according to the Forbes 400 2020 list.
To get a sense of the amount of money earned by Englander in 2020, his payout of $3.8 billion would cover the living expenses of 5,000 families of four for 10 years. The other 24 individuals on the “Rich List” earned between $1 billion and $2.6 billion and top 10 earned a collective $20 billion.
One searches high and low online to find a single word of criticism or objection to the grotesque accumulation of wealth by the hedge fund managers.
It does not register in the capitalist press that there is any problem at all with a handful of billionaires raking in more billions while millions are without jobs, food, shelter and health care while the government and corporate America are demanding workers stay on the job and children go back to school to face the deadly pandemic.
As analyzed on the World Socialist Web Site last week, the GameStop episode—which began as a “short squeeze” applied on hedge funds by a group of small retail investors—in the end resulted in many millions of dollars “pocketed by some of the most powerful sections of the financial oligarchy.”
The rise of the stock market over the past year that is behind the massive increase in the wealth of the hedge fund managers is due to the ongoing purchase of trillions of dollars in financial assets by the US federal government which was massively increased with the passage of the USA CARES Act during the Trump administration. On the eve of the passage of the new $1.9 trillion stimulus package, there is no indication that this policy is going to change with Democratic President Joe Biden in the White House.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/27/rich-f27.html
