In its Working for the Few briefing paper, Oxfam has called attention to a worrying trend: the wealth of 1% of the world’s richest people is equivalent to a total of US$ 110 trillion – 65 times the total wealth of the poorer half of the world’s population. In the last 25 years, wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few; leading to a tiny elite owning 46% of the world’s wealth. An aggravating factor in this situation is that this wealth is mostly from profits derived from capital, property and assets, rather than from wages, as French economist Thomas Piketty recently showed in his outstanding book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A large number of highly profitable businesses are often under-taxed – an unacceptable trend across stock markets around the world. Ultimately, this contributes to economic inequality and creates a new Belle Époque, in which the social mobility of the working class is severely limited by the system of “patrimonial capitalism”.