"We see a lot of hand-wringing - and clearly Trump's victory and Brexit gives that new impetus this year - but there is a lack of concrete alternatives to business as usual," said Max Lawson, Oxfam's head of policy. "There are different ways of running capitalism that could be much, much more beneficial to the majority of people. "If billionaires choose to give their money away then that is a good thing. But inequality matters and you cannot have a system where billionaires are systematically paying lower rates of tax than their secretary or cleaner," Lawson said.Oxfam bases its calculations on data from Swiss bank Credit Suisse and Forbes. The eight individuals named in the report are Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.- Reuters

Source: The Star January 16, 2017 00:24 UTC