Oxfam's Crystal Ball Confirmed: The Top 1% Now Own Over Half of the World's Wealth

The world's richest 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 99 percent combined. This finding comes from Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report for 2015, released last week. Last year, Credit Suisse found the wealthiest 1 percent of adults owned 48 percent of global wealth. According to the new report, the top 1 percent holds 50.4 percent of the world's household wealth.

Credit Suisse's findings align with Oxfam's prediction that global wealth inequality will only increase. Last January, we predicted that the richest 1 percent would capture more than half of all household wealth by 2016. Our prediction was right, but we were too conservative since it happened a year early. Alas, our forecast was confirmed, but it's nothing to celebrate.

The situation at the very top of the global wealth pyramid is much more alarming. When we first calculated it in January 2014, the 85 richest individuals owned more wealth than the poorest half of the planet. This trend has also worsened since then. In January, it was down to 80 people.

The implications of rising extreme wealth inequality are greatly worrying. The highly unbalanced concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer and fewer people impacts social stability within countries and threatens security on a global scale. It makes poverty reduction harder, threatens political inclusion, and compounds other inequalities.

In many ways, today's problem of rising wealth inequality reflects who wields power across societies. For instance, multinational corporations and the very rich can shift their wealth to low-tax jurisdictions and often pay lower rates on their wealth at home than average citizens pay on their hard-earned incomes.

In this respect, the real challenge is how ordinary people can take back political power from wealthy elites with the resources to rig the economic game in their favor. The rigging is evident in the ways elites can undermine democracy and equal representation by infusing huge amounts of cash into the political process. It's also clear in the influence elites use to 'capture' the marketplace of ideas, perpetuating myths like trickle-down policies helping the poor and austerity measures are "responsible" - both of which have been consistently disproven.

Findings such as Credit Suisse's are awaking wide publics to the huge economic disparities that define the modern world. And people are increasingly calling attention to government policies that only work for the wealthy. For instance, in a recent Pew survey, respondents from 34 emerging and developing economies indicated corruption was their country's second biggest problem. The links between corruption, crony capitalism, and inequality aren't hard to find. A study of India's new billionaires found that nearly half made their fortunes in 'rent thick' sectors, meaning their wealth depended on exclusive government giveaways (such as permission to build on public lands or control over the telecom spectrum). Corruption and bribery are often behind such exclusive privileges.

What's encouraging is that citizens from rich and poor countries are pushing back. There seems to be a global zeitgeist that capitalism has descended from being about competition and innovation to monopoly and corporatism. The latter is responsible for the massive inequalities we are grappling with today, especially the unfathomable concentration of the world's wealth among an incredibly small number of people. The Credit Suisse figures empower citizens to hold governments to account for today's inequalities with the cold, hard data to back up the injustices of poverty and power we see every day.

This blog was co-authored by Stephanie Fontana, a Research Intern at Oxfam America.