I guess one of the casualties of the Great Recession is inequity. And that is not bad. So far the biggest casualties of the economic crisis are the world´s richest people. According to Forbes in only one year The net worth of the world’s billionaires fell from $4.4 trillion to $2.4 trillion, while the number of billionaires was down to 793 from 1,125.
. Another positive impact of the crisis is the biggest decline in carbon emissions. I am trying to get information on that but last night I had dinner with one of the largest toll highway operators in the world and traffic is down from 10 to 20 per cent.

Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars

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George on March 12, 2009  · 

I’m 110% sure your comment had no intention to be anything but just a quick thought but, quite frankly mate, this is the most “un-happy” comment I’ve ever seen in your posts. Outch!
Redundancies and companies going bust have left people unemployed, with families and children to feed….
So Bill Gates has now “only” 40 billion?… call ME casualty!

3.0 rating

polac on March 12, 2009  · 

Here you have how it looks like:
http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

3.0 rating

willdom on March 12, 2009  · 

“When you got nothing you got nothing to loose”
ISn’t thath what push you to your first deal?

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XL on March 12, 2009  · 

MARTÍN

I think You have done a estimation mistake. If the crisis reduce the Highway traffic, automatically the Freeways traffic will be increased. And this is worst for the CO2 emissions.
Because Freeways use to be more colapsed and you use to drive slowly and you need to change quite often the speed, so all this thing increase a lot the use of oil.

It’s better to do 10 kilometers in a highway at 120 Km/H without big changes of speed, that 10 km in a Free way, specially now that ther are more used by transportists, to save money.

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Antoin O Lachtnain on March 13, 2009  · 

The rich aren’t necessarily less rich than they were before, it’s more that they weren’t as rich as they thought they were.

It’s only the results of overleveraging (which is the result of overestimating value) become apparent that we will see how much actual assets are lost. Presumably these assets will then move from one group of rich people to another, but maybe not.

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Yekaterina Niculina on April 29, 2009  · 

May be the biggest casualties of the economic crisis are the world´s richest people, but to tell the truth it doesn’t matter for me how much they’ve lost. For me it is important how much I’ve lost, because this problem is actual for everyone in the world. Because we need money to eat, to dress, to pay for community facilities and so on. For me the economic crisis is a real problem.

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