The world has just witnessed more than a dozen billionaires prominently seated at United States President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Among them were four of the world’s five richest men: Elon Musk; Jeff Bezos; Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault. Each has interests they count on the new Trump administration to advance.

Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected, has already seen a massive 77% rise in the stock market valuation of his companies (which include Tesla, SpaceX and X).

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Apart from the tech and media oligarchs, other big billionaire beneficiaries of the Trump administration include the 15 biggest fossil fuel billionaires in the US, whose combined wealth has already increased by US$17 billion since the beginning of the year, according to the Climate Accountability Research Project.

While not all US billionaires supported Trump’s election, more are swinging to his side, just as governments that serve capitalist interests — including Australia’s Labor government — are now cosying up to the second Trump administration.

Since the election, the financial press across the world began to publish stories that support Trump’s boast that he will deliver a new “golden age” for the US.

Marxist economist Michael Roberts writes that the narrative is that “the US economy is bounding forward in terms of economic growth, hi-tech investment and productivity, leaving the rest of the world behind”.

“This success,” Roberts explained in The Next Recession, “is put down to less regulation, an entrepreneurial spirit, lower taxes on investment, etc — in other words, none of this government interference that Europe, Japan and other advanced capitalist economies suffer”.

Apart from a booming stock market and a high US dollar, the key evidence put forward........

© Green Left Weekly