By Wendy Harmer
I'm declaring 2016 to be Year of The Billionaire, like it was this year, the year before and … the year before that.
Despite tanking commodity prices and global conflict, billionaires continue to power along, says Forbes. There's a record 1826 of them on the planet and they're worth $US7.05 trillion ($9.76 trillion) so they're more filthy rich than ever.
Illustration: Glen Le Lievre
We have a child-like fascination with the uber wealthy – how they make their money and spend it, their philanthropic endeavours, personal lives, even how their brains work.
Mining mogul Gina Rinehart tops the list of our 49 billionaires. We tuned in to watch her family saga with a mixture of awe, envy, pity and schadenfreude.
Walt Disney's Scrooge McDuck struck gold in the Klondike, finding a nugget the size of a goose egg.
I'm intrigued by the moneyed class. As a kid I loved the paper comics and lingered over the 'toons of Richie Rich – his solid gold and silver piano keys, sofa made entirely of greenbacks and garden fountain spewing diamonds, emeralds and rubies.
Disney comics' Scrooge McDuck was rolling in it back in the '50s. Skiing and diving on his glittering mountains of billion$ and zillion$ in his money bin in the hills above Duckburg.
How wealthy was McDuck? At thebillfold website, Matt Powers ran the numbers and in today's moolah reckons the "grizzled anthropomorphic bird" to be worth $210 billion and, on that basis, three times richer than the richest man in the world, Bill Gates with his fortune estimated at $79.2 billion.
The simple fantasy I entertained as a kid was: "What would it be like to have that much money?" I wanted to be invited over to Richie Rich's mansion to play, rather than be him. That's where I went wrong. Most making the cut on the Forbes list – 97.6 per cent of them are men – declared they'd be billionaires not long after they'd learnt to walk.
British economist Sam Wilkin's book Wealth Secrets of the One Percent was notable this year, because he's an "insider" with Oxford Economics providing advice to governments and the odd (unnamed) billionaire.
He revealed seven secrets to attaining fabulous wealth, including establishing a monopoly by ruthless means; taking risks with other people's money; getting into the most inhospitable emerging markets where no one else wants to do business and spinning complex laws into gold. Dodgy stuff.
It's not enough to know how to be rich, says Wilkin. Personality is a key driver.
"These people tend to be pretty merciless, really competitive. You have to go in willing to fight tooth and nail to be that winner and be comfortable and untroubled by wiping everybody else out."
But some of the super rich are troubled by their good fortune. Inspired by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal is giving away $32 billion to charity and Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan have pledged 99 per cent of their Facebook shares worth $45.7 billion to their chosen causes of health and education.
However, divesting yourself of your dosh isn't as easy as you'd imagine. Vanity projects are doomed to fail. Unsurprisingly, the world's poor don't care much for having moneybags dumped on their heads by "colonial philanthropists".
(Zuckerberg's $100 million intervention in 2010 to remake the Newark education system was judged a "complete disaster" with most of the money spent on expensive consultants instead of actual textbooks.)
With globalisation there are more ways than ever to make your pile and debate still rages whether dizzying wealth can ever be accumulated ethically. The 19th-century French writer Honore de Balzac said: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." Perhaps rich-list author J.K. Rowling, for one, has finally put paid to that.
If the question is: "How do I get me some of that sweet billionaire action?", Wilkin says it's easier than ever, due to the "rise of the financial sector and the rise of fast-growing emerging markets."
You don't have to be Scrooge McDuck lucky. Once a shoe shiner in Glasgow, he sailed to America as a cabin chicken on a cattle ship from Clyde and struck gold in the Klondike, finding a nugget the size of a goose egg. According to Forbes, Scrooge McDuck was "famously frugal". "Once fought a bear over a $2 jar of honey, never gives to charity, still has the first dime he ever earned."
Still plenty of Scrooges like him. These days he'd probably be POTUS.
The ways to get poorer remain the same. No secrets there.
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Putting aside whether NSW cyclists should be required to carry ID or cop a $106 fine (and when you don't need a licence to ride a bike it's an outrageous overreach from famously anti-cycling minister Duncan Gay), there's the matter of keeping track of a thin sliver of plastic as you go about your daily business.
We move from car to bike and back again, change clothes, swap handbags, inadvertently leave the wallet or purse at home and it's so easy to not have your licence on your person. We all do it.
So why do we meekly acquiesce to laws that punish us mightily for mere human forgetfulness?
Maybe we should all be tattooed with an ID number at birth and be done with it. The way things are going, there are plenty who'd think the idea is just tops.