Luke 12:39 And this know, that if the goodman of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched, and not have suffered his house to be broken through.
Here's the full timeline, combining the policy/structural events with billionaire counts and the GDP comparison
Timeline: NAFTA to Now
| Year | Measure / Event | # Billionaires (global) | Combined Billionaire Wealth | World GDP |
|---|
| 1994 | NAFTA takes effect (Jan 1) | 349 | $762 billion | ~$28 trillion |
| 1996 | — | 447 | $1.1 trillion | ~$31 trillion |
| 1999 | Glass-Steagall repealed (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) — lets commercial and investment banks merge, ends Depression-era wall between them | ~465 | ~$1.0 trillion | ~$33 trillion |
| 2000 | Commodity Futures Modernization Act — deregulates derivatives trading (sets up the instruments behind the 2008 crash) | 470 | $898 billion | $33.9 trillion |
| 2001 | China joins WTO; Bush tax cuts (EGTRRA) begin lowering top marginal and estate tax rates | 538 | $1.8 trillion | — |
| 2003 | Bush tax cuts extended to dividends and capital gains (JGTRRA) — the main channel through which billionaire wealth (mostly equity, not wages) is taxed | — | — | — |
| 2008 | Financial crisis; TARP bailout ($700B); Fed cuts rates to near-zero | — | — | $64.2 trillion |
| 2008-2014 | Quantitative Easing (QE1, QE2, QE3) — Fed buys trillions in bonds, inflating stock and asset prices, which is where billionaire wealth mostly lives | — | — | — |
| 2012 | — | 1,226 | $4.6 trillion | ~$75 trillion |
| 2017 | Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — corporate rate cut from 35% to 21%; accelerated depreciation; territorial tax system favoring multinational profit-shifting | — | — | $81.1 trillion |
| 2020 | COVID stimulus + a second round of emergency QE + near-zero rates — markets crashed briefly, then billionaire wealth hit record highs within months while unemployment peaked | — | — | $85.8 trillion |
| 2024 | AI investment boom accelerates | ~2,780 | ~$14 trillion (est.) | $109.7 trillion |
| 2026 | Record year — 32 years after NAFTA | 3,428 | $20.1 trillion | ~$126.3 trillion |
GDP growth vs. billionaire wealth growth (1994 → 2026)
- World GDP: ~$28T → ~$126.3T = grew about 4.5x
- Billionaire combined wealth: $762B → $20.1T = grew about 26x
Billionaire wealth grew roughly
six times faster than the global economy that was supposedly generating it. That gap is the number that matters — it means billionaire wealth grew far faster than the productive output of the world, which is only possible if wealth is being
redistributed upward faster than it's being
created.
Top 0.1% global wealth share (the better measure, as you suspected)
This is a cleaner metric than the Forbes billionaire count, because it isn't distorted by how many people happen to cross the $1B threshold in a given year — it tracks the actual share of
all global wealth held by the top sliver of humanity:
- 1995: 3.7% of all global wealth
- 2025: 6.1% of all global wealth
That's the top 0.1% of the world's population going from owning roughly 1 out of every 27 dollars on Earth to roughly 1 out of every 16 — a
65% increase in their share, on top of total global wealth itself growing enormously (global household wealth hit roughly $600 trillion by 2025). So this isn't just "the same slice of a bigger pie" — the slice itself got proportionally bigger too.
The mechanism, stated plainly: almost every item in that timeline — NAFTA, Glass-Steagall repeal, derivatives deregulation, the Bush and Trump tax cuts, and above all the Fed's post-2008 and post-2020 money-printing (QE) — did one of two things: it either weakened labor's bargaining position (trade deals, offshoring) or it inflated the value of the assets billionaires already own (tax cuts on capital, near-zero interest rates, bond-buying that pushes money into stocks and real estate). None of these measures were explicitly "billionaire enrichment" policies on their face — they were sold as growth, competitiveness, or crisis-response measures. But the compounding effect across three decades is unmistakable in the numbers themselves: capital's return outran the economy's growth by a wide and widening margin, almost exactly the dynamic Thomas Piketty's "r > g" (return on capital exceeds growth) thesis describes, and NAFTA sits right at the start of that acceleration.
Top 0.001% (~56,000 people): now hold three times more wealth than the entire bottom half of humanity
