Looking for trillions: Oxfam believes trillionaires are a decade away. Could they be already around?

Oxfam brought out its annual inequality report to coincide with a gathering of the world’s business elite at Davos. The report uses a shock and awe tactic to highlight inequality. It says that at the current rates of growth, it could take 230 years to end poverty but we could have our first trillionaire in just 10 years.

Trillionaires are a measure of their financial assets. They may already exist. Nothing beats oil | Oxfam estimated oil and gas companies were their big winners in the recent past. How should one value people who control them? Saudi Aramco has a market value in excess of $2 trillion. It’s state controlled.

The state in question is an absolute monarchy. Jeff Bezos figures often in the Oxfam report and the House of Saud not at all. But it’s the monarchy that has trillions at its disposal. Opaque holdings | Conversations about trillionaires are based on an assumption that people know what the rich own.

That may be misplaced. Consider the mysterious Brunei Investment Agency (BIA), the country’s wealth fund under the Sultan’s control. It owns the Dorchester Collection, a chain of luxury hotels. But boycott calls over Brunei’s sharia laws have made BIA mask an already opaque investment portfolio.

Who knows their true worth after four decades of investment? Finally, funny trillions | The key idea underlying trillions is creation of business value. Trust central banks to turn the idea on its head. The US Federal Reserve has made trillions into a mere matter of creating money out of nothing at all through a tool called quantitative easing.

A balance sheet that was less than $1 trillion before the global financial crisis in 2008 had expanded to almost $9 trillion by 2022..