The number of billionaires worldwide rose above 1,500 last year, a 10 percent jump from 2015, due largely to a surge in Asia, Swiss banking giant UBS and auditors PwC said Thursday. In an annual report, UBS and PwC said that last year marked the first time it recorded more billionaires in Asia (637) than in the United States (563), crediting the rise of China's entrepreneurs. Europe took third spot in the report's billionaire database with 342.

Kenya has been called an unsafe place for tourists because of frequent violent crimes. Former president Barack Obama said in a speech that it's time for the country to "change habits" because "too often here in Kenya … corruption is tolerated." But there is at least one thing the country gets better than the United States: Income equality.

A lot of people are overjoyed to cross the $100,000 threshold in annual income. And they should be — a six-figure salary is nothing to sneeze at. But as income inequality in the US continues to worsen, a $100,000 salary creeps ever-closer to being an upper-middle-class income, not a sure sign of wealth. In fact, according to a Business Insider analysis of US Census data, the $100,000 distinction isn't enough to put anyone, at any age for which there is reliable data, in the top 1% of personal incomes.

A flurry of new reports have provided yet more data demonstrating that inequality is getting worse. All right, this does not qualify as a shock. But it really isn’t your imagination. The economic crisis, nearly a decade on now, has been global in scope — working people most everywhere continue to suffer while the one percent are doing just fine. One measure of this is wages.

Here's an amazing fact: The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 114 million from 2012 to 2013. That is a simply massive one-year decline, and it's not even the biggest drop in recent years. From 2010 to 2011, global poverty fell by 132 million people. From 2008 to 2013, the number fell by an average of 88 million people per year. If that rate of progress keeps up, global poverty will be eliminated in less than a decade.

More Americans are struggling to make rent. The number of renters dedicating at least half of their income toward housing hit a record high of 11 million people in 2014, according to the annual State of the Nation's Housing Report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. A total of 21.3 million are spending 30% or more of their paycheck to cover the rent -- also a record high. Personal finance experts generally suggest budgeting around 30% of monthly income to cover housing costs.

Wealth inequality has grown to the stage where 62 of the world’s richest people own as much as the poorest half of humanity combined, according to a new report. The research, conducted by the charity Oxfam, found that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population – 3.6 billion people – has fallen by 41 per cent, or a trillion US dollars, since 2010. While this group has become poorer, the wealth of the richest 62 people on the planet has increased...

Rising inequality of incomes in the US is being accompanied by a rising gap in life expectancy by income category. Ronald Lee and Peter R. Orzag chaired a recent committee on behalf of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that explains these patterns in "The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy by Income: Implications for Federal Programs and Policy Responses."

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway famously disagreed about the American elite. “The very rich are different from you and me,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Yes,” Hemingway shot back, “they have more money.” With inequality in America continuing to rise, we revisited Fitzgerald and Hemingway’s (perhaps apocryphal) dispute, conducting a series of experiments designed to pinpoint the differences between the rich and those of more modest means.

Among the women paying $1,000 for a massage and the men lounging in $100m homes in the billionaires’ playground of the Hamptons is a largely unseen, mostly Latino, workforce toiling all summer in order to survive the winter