(Newswire.net— October 8, 2020) — The coronavirus pandemic has made the richest people around the world even richer, Deutsche Welle cited consultancy PwC, the main Swiss bank UBS.
According to the data published Wednesday, during the coronavirus pandemic, the total combined wealth of the world’s billionaires increased to 10.2 trillion dollars. UBS states that this increase in wealth by 27.5 percent occurred since the beginning of the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and only in the period from April to July.
UBS also announced that the wealth of billionaires reached a new maximum, surpassing the previous peak of 8.9 billion dollars that was reached at the end of 2017. At the same time, millions of people around the world lost their jobs.
More than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to enlarge their fortunes totaling to around $10.2 trillion by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
The increase in their wealth was partly due to the recovery of stock markets and stocks, and their investments in fast-growing areas, such as technology and health care, which proved to be new drivers of wealth, the results of the study show.
Billionaires profited even more from the crisis because they bought more shares of companies at a time when markets around the world were collapsing.
According to published figures, just over 200 of the 2,189 billionaires publicly donated a total of $7.2 billion to help combat the medical crisis caused by COVID-19, as well as the social and economic fallout that the virus has caused.
On top of that, the number of billionaires has reached a new maximum. Now there are 2,189 of them, while in 2017 there were 2,158. The richest man in the world is still the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, whose fortune is estimated at 189 billion dollars.