[makomk]

Yeah, Oxfam have been pushing a bunch of similar misleading claims using the same trick, such as arguing that people across the world lost vast amounts of pay during the pandemic even as the rich got richer by a vast amount and insinuating this was money that was somehow redistributed from one group to the other. Of course, this is just using the fact that share prices anticipate future changes in the economy to measure from close to the bottom of the pandemic-induced drop, which happened right around when the pandemic was first declared and it was just starting to affect people, and there is no actual mechanism by which money could be transferred in such a fashion. The money lost in pay was essentially destroyed; people didn't work, didn't produce things, and the real global economy of stuff available to purchase shrunk by if anything much more than that (due to furlough, unemployment, inputs other than labour, etc). The increase in wealth of the super-rich similarly was not transferred from anywhere, it was just the valuation of things they already owned going up due to the price shares were trading at increasing. This didn't mean an equal sum of money was somehow transferred into the stock market to do this.