Pity the poor billionaire, for today he feels a new and unsettling emotion: fear. The world order he once clung to is crumbling faster than the value of the pound. In its place, he frets, will come chaos. Remember this, as the plutocrats gather this week high above us in the ski resort of Davos: they are terrified... Just look at the new report from the summit organisers that begins by asking plaintively, “Is the world sleepwalking into a crisis?” In the accompanying survey of a thousand bosses, money men (because finance, like wealth, is still mainly a male thing) and other “Davos decision-makers”, nine out of 10 say they fear a trade war or other “economic confrontation between major powers”. Most confess to mounting anxieties about “populist and nativist agendas” and “public anger against elites”. As the cause of this political earthquake, they identify two shifting tectonic plates: climate change and “increasing polarisation of societies”.

In its pretend innocence, its barefaced blame-shifting, its sheer ruddy sauce, this is akin to arsonists wailing about the flames from their own bonfire. Populism of all stripes may be anathema to the billionaire class, but they helped create it. For decades, they inflicted insecurity on the rest of us and told us it was for our own good. They have rigged an economic system so that it paid them bonanzas and stiffed others. They have lobbied and funded politicians to give them the easiest of rides...

... No natural force created this intense unfairness. The gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us did not gape wide open overnight. Rather, it has been decades in the widening and it was done deliberately. The UK was the frontline of the war to create greater inequality: in her first two terms as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher more than halved the top rate of income tax paid by high earners. She broke the back of the trade unions. Over their 16 years in office, Thatcher and John Major flogged off more public assets than France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Australia and Canada put together... Where Thatcher’s shock troops led, the rest of the west more or less followed. Political leaders across the spectrum gave the rich what they wanted. It didn’t matter whether you voted for Tony Blair or David Cameron, Bill Clinton or George W Bush, either way you got Davos man. They cut taxes for top earners and for businesses, they uprooted the public sector to create opportunities for private firms, and they struck trade deals negotiated in secret that gave big corporations as much as they could ever dream of.

At last, more than a decade after the banking crash, the regime has run out of road. Hence the popular anger, so ferocious that the political and financial elites can neither comprehend nor control it...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/23/panic-davos-inequality-global-elite