Robert Peston

And I think the important thing to say about him is he's one of a sort of trio of these immensely distinguished.

They're all French, actually, economists.

It's Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Sayers and him who know more about who owns the world's wealth and have the most interesting ideas about how we can end what many would see as a scandal that they pay so little tax.

So here's our conversation with Gabriel Zuckman.

So just to summarize, 3,000 households control or, you know, have wealth equivalent to 17% of global income.

Correct.

Exactly.

I mean, this is something obviously that's concerned me and Steph for years, this concentration of power, particularly what it's doing to our politics.

But if we could also just think for a second about the main drivers of this extraordinary concentration of wealth.

Yeah.

I mean, one of them I'm assuming are the sort of winner takes all nature of the digital economy that started to explode in size from the mid 1990s that we created.

What we saw is the creation of businesses.

whether it's your Google alphabets or these days, your Claude's and your open AIs that become essentially networks where the rewards for whoever happens to be the early owners are just off the charts huge.

And then I assume the other big driver, since you're talking about the post 2007 and 8 period, is just the way that zero cost of money, very low interest rates, inflated assets.

asset prices, but what would be the other drivers of what's doing this?

So this is staturism and Reaganism?

You know, surely you're borrowing money vast amounts against your slime business.

I have a retail business.

And funding your lavish lifestyle.

Or a boom loop for them, a doom loop for us.