Forty Percent World’s Wealth Gone

NowPublic: Forty Percent World's Wealth GoneNews Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch, in starting the World Economic Forum in Davos, revealed that the past five quarters had seen 40 per cent of the world’s wealth destroyed. … but it’s likely this statement is from Blackstone Group’s chairman Steve Schwarzman. [link]

Using Google’s Blog Search and News RSS tools, I easily set up feeds to search for upcoming discussion about “40 percent of the world’s wealth” in order to track reactions to this utterly historical statement.

As Google says, “Can I subscribe to search results?

Yes. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.

As of today, blogSearch reports about 25 hits on losing nearly half the world’s wealth. There’s 35 hits on Google News.

Not enough! A day later, wouldn’t this be a lead story everywhere?

Schwarzman said an “almost incomprehensible” amount of cash had evaporated… Before the crash, folks discussed America’s dominant role, such as “7 percent of the world’s population consumes 40 percent of the world’s wealth” and “One percent of the world’s adults owns 40 percent of the world’s wealth, while the bottom half combined owns less than one percent”.

Oddly, the head of UK’s opposition party said, “Bankers should do charity work in poor communities to make amends for the credit crunch.” That’ll be the day. The Archbishop of York says, ““True charity repudiates the idea of personal gain as a result of lending money to make ruthless usury bringing about permanent disappropriation and enslavement.”

HA! Just goes to show what they know: Disappropriation stumps the dictionary.