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Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has given only a tiny fraction of his $160 billion fortune to philanthropic causes, falling far behind fellow billionaires such as Bill and Melinda Gates and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, public records show.

Although Bezos, 55, and his estranged wife MacKenzie recently pledged $2 billion to a new charitable initiative, their previous giving amounts to a total of just over $145 million or .0906 percent — far less than one percent — of their net worth. Out of $100,000, that would be like spending $90.06 on charity.

“The record of both Amazon and Jeff Bezos reveals that they are takers, not givers,” said Queens City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, whose district includes Long Island City, where Amazon plans to set up a corporate headquarters. “When they make promises of how generous they will be, I look at what they have done in the past to know what the truth really is.”

Over nearly two decades, Jeff Bezos has given paltry donations to the Bezos Family Foundation, a charity that was started by his parents in Washington state in Sept. 2000, state incorporation filings show.

Between 2000 and 2017, Bezos contributed just under $6 million to the group that Jacklyn and Miguel Bezos kickstarted with $20,000.

Ma and Pa Bezos, who were early investors in their son’s fledgling company in 1995, are worth as much as $30 billion today.

In 2004, Bezos, who had already amassed a net worth of just over $2 billion, joined the board of his parents’ non-profit, along with his wife and siblings Mark and Lisa and their respective partners, according to tax filings for the group reviewed by The Post.

But it was the parents who continued to finance the non-profit, mainly through donations of Amazon stock. In 2017, Jacklyn and Miguel Bezos contributed $30,266,250 in stock to their charity, public documents show. (The foundation makes donations to educational initiatives in the US and around the world.)

It wasn’t until 2011 that Jeff Bezos, whose wealth had shot up to more than $18 billion, finally gave his first contribution to the Bezos Family Foundation: $940,538 in Amazon stock through Zefram LLC, a company that he controls, federal filings show.

As his wealth climbed, Bezos continued to keep a tight rein on his cash, at least when it came to his family charity. In 2015, the year his wealth took a nearly $30 billion leap and his net worth shot up to $58.4 billion, the family foundation received a total of $5,002,590 in Amazon stock from Jeff and MacKenzie, public records show.

The $5,943,128 the tech titan donated to his parents’ charity over the last 17 years averages less than $350,000 annually.

Bezos has long been known for his stingy ways with employees at Amazon. According to Brad Stone’s 2013 book “The Everything Store,” meals in the company cafeterias are not subsidized for workers and new employees receive a backpack with orientation materials and various pieces of equipment, including a power adaptor, that they are asked to return upon resignation.

But in the last year Bezos seems to have opened his philanthropic spigot slightly. He took to Twitter to ask his 700,000 followers for suggestions on the direction his philanthropy should take, and he recently doled out $33 million to finance scholarships for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children and $10 million to With Honor, a political action committee that helps veterans enter politics.

After announcing the creation of the Bezos Day One Fund, an initiative to battle homelessness and support early childhood education with the creation of Montessori schools in needy neighborhoods in September, Bezos earmarked $97.5 million to homeless charities across the country.

Still, the grand total of Bezos’s giving — $146,443,128 — is well below other major wealthy philanthropists, who signed on to billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s 2006 challenge to give half their fortune to philanthropy.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the most generous philanthropist in the US according to a survey by “The Chronicle of Philanthropy,” a Washington-based group that tracks giving. Gates has given out $35.8 billion — more than one third of his current $96 billion net worth — in contributions to global health, education and relief projects from his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2000. In 2018, federal filings show the couple doled out nearly $5 billion in contributions, equivalent to 5 percent of their wealth, in a single year.

Last year, Bloomberg, who is worth an estimated $46.3 billion, pledged $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University, to be used exclusively for financial aid. Previously, he has donated a total of more than $6 billion to charitable causes, or nearly 13 percent of his net worth.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth is estimated at $54.3 billion, has pledged to donate 99 percent of his shares in the social media site to charity.

In Long Island City, where Amazon is set to gain more than $1.5 billion in city tax credits and a helipad for executive use in exchange for agreeing to set up half of its headquarters — the other half is slated for Arlington, VA — the company has so far promised $5 million for “work force development,” Van Bramer told The Post. The company said that it plans to create 25,000 jobs in the city.

“It’s not very encouraging,” Van Bramer said of Bezos’ past lack of largesse, adding that Amazon executives and City Council members are meeting on Wednesday to address the company’s role in community development in Long Island City. “Bezos needs to be more philanthropic.”

The city’s credit card delinquency rates and level of bad personal debt are the highest in the nation, which saw household debt and credit soar by $219 billion, or 1.6 percent, to $13.51 trillion, in the third quarter of 2018 — a record $837 billion more than its previous peak in 2008.

Facing an environment of mounting personal bankruptcies and financial meltdowns, unprecedented numbers of local residents are just one paycheck away from total monetary disaster.

The latest surge in toxic debt is blowing a huge hole in New Yorkers’ personal finances, these experts say. Forty percent of Americans recently said they could not cover a $400 emergency — and that proportion may be even higher in New York City, analysts say.

“It’s really bad right now,” Kelly Figueroa, a consumer debt counselor in New York at GreenPath, a national nonprofit, told The Post.

“Like the rest of the nation, most New Yorkers are living paycheck to paycheck,” she added. “But in New York, the situation is even worse because of the city’s higher — and rising — cost of living.”

From low-income to highly paid consumers, Kelly says, local clients’ unsecured distressed household debt ranges from an average of $20,000 per individual to as high as $100,000.

Credit card debt troubles in particular have jumped in New York City, from 30 percent of client caseloads at GreenPath to 40 percent in the past few years, even as housing and mortgage stress cases stemming from the financial crisis have ebbed.

New York City is now its No. 1 metro market, followed by Atlanta and Los Angeles, as measured by the sheer volume of distressed consumers seeking assistance and relief, according to Money Management International, a nationwide credit-counseling network.

“New York has the second-most expensive housing market in the US; rents are rising along with interest rates and credit card and other debt, including auto loans,” said Thomas Nitzsche, a consumer debt expert at Money Management International, citing some of the nonprofit’s latest findings.

A large population with average wages well above the national average — and a low unemployment rate — can give residents the courage to take on large credit card balances and debt, analysts say.

However, since 2010, rents in New York City overall have jumped 31 percent — and even as much as 45 percent in some neighborhoods, according to the StreetEasy Rent Index in late 2018.

This may explain why many city consumers are sinking in card and other debt, say analysts.

A New York Fed study shows average credit card balances alone in Manhattan hit $7,400 by 2016, compared with the nation’s $5,400.

Credit card delinquency rates for holders 90 days late on payments reached a stunning 15.1 percent for the Bronx and nearly 10 percent citywide, compared with 8.3 percent nationwide.

Analysts figure those balances and delinquency rates have since ticked up further in New York.

Marathon Partners wants to see a return on its investment and is questioning private equity firm TPG's grip over the discount beauty company.

E.l.f. Beauty is feeling the pressure of an activist investor.

New York-based hedge fund Marathon Partners Equity Management, which has a near 9 percent stake in the publicly listed discount cosmetics company, wrote to the board Friday, urging an overhaul of the firm’s operating strategy, corporate governance practices and executive compensation.

“It is unfortunate that we have not been able to find common ground with the E.l.f. team and board over the past six months,” said Mario Cibelli, head of Marathon Partners. “Senior leadership and the board have lost sight of the obligations and responsibilities that come with accepting new investors and public company ownership.”

The investor detailed that since E.l.f. went public in September 2016, its share price has fallen by 51 percent and stressed that the firm needed to optimize its expense structure and refocus on profitable growth in order to regain investor credibility and drive shareholder returns higher.

In order to do reduce operating expenses, all options must be considered, including difficult decisions related to personnel, compensation, office space requirements and E.l.f.-owned store count, it said.

Marathon Partners also questioned the amount of influence private equity firm TPG, which owns close to 30 percent of Oakland, Calif.-based E.l.f., has over the board, with a total of three representatives sitting on it.

To ease these concerns, it demanded a non-TPG designated director be appointed to the role of lead independent director and for the board to seek new, independent counsel to review the stockholders agreement. It also pushed for the role of chairman and chief executive officer to be split.

“The board has been overly accommodative to the interests of TPG on several levels, and this stance has harmed the independent public shareholders of E.l.f.,” Cibelli said in his letter.

It did, however, acknowledge that the board had attempted to address some of these issues of the past few months, namely adding a person not affiliated with TPG to the compensation committee.

The letter comes after E.l.f., which was founded in 2004, posted an 11 percent slide in third-quarter sales in November, while net income also fell, to $8.4 million from $9.6 million in the prior-year period.

Shares in E.l.f. rose 2.8 percent to $8.48 in midday trading.

Tarang Amin, chairman and chief executive of e.l.f. Beauty, said: “We have an active and ongoing dialogue with Marathon Partners and the firm’s views are well understood by our board and leadership team. We continue to actively address a number of strategies to strengthen e.l.f. and build long-term stockholder value.”

A representatives for TPG did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Quoted hedge fund manager will divert funds to projects that improve diversity

Man Group, the London-listed hedge fund, has pulled its multimillion-pound sponsorship of the Booker Prize, leaving one of the English language’s most prestigious literary awards without a commercial sponsor.

The decision to sever the 18-year relationship, which has seen the asset manager plough more than £25m into the prize since 2002, came after a review of charitable spending by Man, which is one of the world’s largest listed hedge funds.

It concluded that it would instead dedicate donations to improving diversity within financial services, according to a statement this weekend by Man’s chief executive, Luke Ellis.

But Man’s sponsorship was also controversial, with some prominent authors decrying a big City firm’s involvement. The 2014 move to widen the prize to capture writers from the United States was also contentious.

“It has been a privilege to sponsor the Man Booker Prize for nearly two decades,” said Mr Ellis. “The Man Booker Prizes have meant a huge amount to all of us at Man Group and I want to take the opportunity to applaud the exceptional work of the Booker Prize Foundation.”

The foundation’s trustees — who include Helena Kennedy QC, the human-rights barrister, and Ben Okri, the 1991 prizewinner — said the prizes would run as normal this year, that the foundation was “confident” that another sponsor would be in place by 2020 and that it was currently in “discussions with a new sponsor”.

Baroness Kennedy said: “‘We would like to put on record the foundation’s appreciation of Man Group’s sponsorship. However, all good things must come to an end and we look forward to taking the prizes into the next phase with our new supporter.”

The fiction prize is the UK’s most prestigious literary prize and is eligible to any novel published in the UK and Ireland, written in English. Last year was the first when novels published in Ireland were eligible.

In 2013, it was announced that the prize — previously only open to writers from the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland or Zimbabwe — would be opened up to include US and other global writers in 2014. Since then, two American writers, George Saunders for Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017 and Paul Beatty in 2016 for The Sellout, have taken the prize.

Since it was first awarded in 1969, the brainchild of the publisher Tom Maschler and the late Martyn Goff, a bookseller-turned-literary entrepreneur, 50 prizes have been handed out.

Winning authors have included Kingsley Amis, who said he would spend the prize money on “booze! and curtains”, Margaret Atwood, and Yann Martel who received the prize for The Life of Pi in 2002, the first year that Man sponsored the award.

Your weekly briefing on the UK economy

Not very, at least according to Ben Broadbent, a deputy governor of the Bank of England, who spoke on the subject last week. 

Growth in debt better predicts financial crises than the overall level, he said, but much of the increase in borrowing over the past few years is due to student loans and car finance deals know as personal contract purchases.

This debt isn’t really debt, he argues, student loans are equivalent to a graduate tax while PCPs are more like renting than buying a car. 

But even if Mr Broadbent is right and the rise in consumer borrowing is not a worry for financial stability there are reasons for economists to be concerned. 

Data published last week by the Office for National Statistics showed that UK household spending in the year to last March reached the highest level since 2005, and as real incomes were under pressure that meant consumers either dug into savings or borrowed a little more. 

Wage growth has been ticking up recently, but if consumers decide that all the political uncertainty means now is the time to rebuild their savings and pay down their loans, consumer spending could slow and the economy as a whole with it.

Focus turns to central bank’s first meeting since December’s market turmoil

Will the Fed keep markets on the up?

The US Federal Reserve will meet this week for the first time since stocks tumbled in December, as investors grew increasingly worried over the outlook for the US economy.

Since then, first-quarter earnings from corporate America have met expectations even if they are growing far more slowly than last year, when tax cuts turbocharged profits. Add to that a hangover from a record-breaking government shutdown, which ended on Friday, and there are expectations that the Fed will stick to its recent script, which reiterated that it will be patient as it assesses the state of the economy.

Kevin Logan, chief US economist for HSBC who reckons the Fed will hold off raising interest rates until September, says if policymakers uses the word “patient” this week it will send an important signal.

“If the word ‘patient’ were to be used in January and repeated in March, that would suggest no rate hikes at the May or June policy meetings,” Mr Logan said in a note to clients.

Investors will also be keeping a close eye on what Fed chair Jay Powell says about the pace at which the central bank is shrinking its multi-trillion dollar balance sheet. Richard Henderson

Should Hong Kong act on the perils of share pledging?

The collapse of shares in Chinese property developer Jiayuan International appeared to slot into an easy narrative. Investors have been wary of the heavily indebted sector for months, so rumours that Jiayuan might not repay a $350m bond due the same day seemed the likely culprit for the crashing stock.

But after the calamitous day’s trading on January 17, the property developer said it had repaid the bond. It was almost a week later when Jiayuan disclosed that, on the same day, a company controlled by its chairman had been forced to sell shares that were pledged as collateral for a bank loan.

The practice of executives or major shareholders pledging their stock in a company as collateral for a loan is not uncommon in China, where regulators have become increasingly concerned about its ability to exacerbate stock market declines. In Hong Kong, where Jiayuan is listed, share pledges are often not disclosed because banks, insurers and brokers are considered “qualified lenders” and are therefore exempt from revealing whether shares have been pledged.

But the case of Jiayuan should put more pressure on the Securities and Futures Commission, Hong Kong’s financial regulator, and the government to address the issue, according to corporate governance experts.

“This problem has been festering for over 20 years,” said David Webb, an independent investor and governance expert. “The latest wave of collapses increases the pressure on the SFC and the government to remove the disclosure exemption from the law and bring pledges into the daylight.” The SFC declined to comment. Emma Dunkley

Will traders continue warming to the pound?

Optimism continued to build in sterling markets after the currency broke above $1.30 on Wednesday following news that the opposition Labour party would probably back a proposal that could delay Brexit and prevent a no-deal exit.

The pound powered to a two-month high against both the euro and the dollar following news of support from Labour for the bill, which MPs will vote on next Tuesday. The Cooper-Boles amendment aims to rule out a no-deal Brexit and would give parliament a vote on extending Article 50 if Prime Minister Theresa May fails to win parliamentary approval of her deal by February 26.

Sterling has appreciated more than 2 per cent in January as investors continued to cut negative bets. The warming in sentiment towards the pound, of course, raises the risk of a sharp move lower if the UK were to crash out. Vasileios Gkionakis, global head of FX strategy at Swiss private bank Lombard Odier, said “all hell would break loose” in the event of a hard Brexit, with sterling potentially plummeting to as low as $1.10.

And some believe investors are neglecting that risk. “FX markets are grossly underestimating the chances of the UK exiting the EU on March 29th without a deal,” said Stephen Gallo, head of European FX strategy at BMO Capital Markets. Eva Szalay

How big is the leveraged loan market?

Comparisons with the 2008 crisis abound as concerns grow over the leveraged loan market. An analysis published by the Bank of England on Friday put the value of outstanding loans made to low-rated, already indebted companies at a heady $2.2tn worldwide, a far higher figure than the $1.3tn often cited. 

“This makes the stock of leveraged loans in 2018 comparable to the stock of US subprime mortgages before the onset of the financial crisis, if measured relative to the size of the relevant credit market,” the BoE noted. 

While there are fears that investors exposed to these loans will suffer when the next US recession hits, the BoE does not expect the debt burden will lead to a sequel to the financial crisis. 

But risks in leveraged loans are stacking up. For example, these loans increasingly lack protections, leaving investors with fewer safeguards should corporate borrowers struggle.

We are in the late stages of a credit cycle, with too much money chasing too little value

There were many disconnects between last week’s World Economic Forum and the real world. One of the most notable was the techno-optimism displayed by many participants, which was in sharp contrast to what the markets themselves are expecting from the technology sector this year.

The coming spate of initial public offerings in particular looks shaky. Uber’s chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi was all over Davos, talking up the company’s forthcoming initial public offering. But the talk had a whiff of desperation. Uber, along with Lyft and a host of other large, still-private tech companies such as Slack and Airbnb, are likely to try to go public sooner rather than later — not only because of worries about a coming recession and volatile markets, but because they have grown so fat on private funding, it is unclear whether the market will be able to sustain their valuations. (Uber’s, for example, is pegged at $100bn.) They want to get their money while the getting is good.

It is a situation that is both similar, and not, to the dotcom boom and bust that occurred at the turn of the century. Back then, I was working in venture capital in London. Companies like the now-defunct, LVMH-backed online retailer boo.com — the pets.com of Europe — were spending millions on glossy ads, and would-be entrepreneurs were trolling for easy money at First Tuesday networking events. Remember those little red-for-investor or green-for-talent lapel dots everyone had to wear?

Then, as now, we were at the late stages of a credit cycle, with too much money chasing too little value. And then, like now, investors were counting on a spate of hot IPOs to pour a little more kerosene on markets that were clearly over-inflated. We all know how that ended, on both sides of the Atlantic.

That is not to say that there wasn’t value created then, as there has been now. For every unsuccessful dog food retailer or expensive T-shirt purveyor that went out of business in the dotcom bust, there were miles of broadband cable laid, which created the infrastructure that companies such as Google now capitalise on. Today, the sharing economy has markets and conveniences where before there were none.

The real difference between the two eras is in the capital markets themselves. Venture money collapsed post-2000, came back up, fell again after the financial crisis, then rebounded to record levels after 2014. The number of new start-ups has proliferated. Yet the number of IPOs has fallen. This is due to a paradox — while technology has made starting a company cheaper, becoming a success is now more expensive. That is because of an arms race to build the next “unicorn” start-up, one with a market capitalisation of over $1bn.

As University of California academics Martin Kenney and John Zysman put it in a forthcoming paper on the shifts in start-up funding, entitled “Unicorns, Cheshire Cats, and the New Dilemmas of Entrepreneurial Finance”, “start-ups are each trying to ignite the winner-take-all dynamics through rapid expansion characterised by breakneck and almost invariably money-losing growth, often with no discernible path to profitability”.

Over the past five or so years, there’s been a massive growth in the number of venture-capital-backed unicorns. Companies such as Uber, Lyft, Spotify, and Dropbox can lose money hand over fist, and yet still continue to grow in valuation. Indeed, it is all part of the new business dynamic.

Low barriers to entry result in many competitors and a race to spend as much as possible to grab market share. Not only do the private companies that emerge from this unproductive cycle become bloated, so too do the venture funds themselves. Billion-dollar venture funds, once unheard of, are now commonplace. Last year, Sequoia raised an $8bn seed fund, and SoftBank a whopping $100bn fund.

Big, of course, begets big. As more and more heavyweight VCs bid up the value of start-ups, others have to follow. It’s up or out. The result has been not only a new bubble in IPO markets, but the undercutting of a host of public companies that actually have to worry about profits. The classic examples would be Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry, or Airbnb’s of hotels.

This may be good for some of the VCs who can use the inflated values of unicorns on their books to raise more money and charge more management fees. But I can’t see how it is good for economic value overall. Massive debt financing of unprofitable firms to create monopolies might benefit some entrepreneurs and investors, but it distorts capital and labour markets and is anti-competitive.

As long as investors are willing to accept growth as a metric for value, the music can keep playing. But as the University of California academics note, “unicorns are mythical beasts”. This year, their financial reality, as well as the sustainability of the current funding model, will be subject to some much-needed testing.

Some of the new crop of hyped-up companies may eventually turn into Cheshire cats, disappearing and leaving behind only the grins of those who got out before the bubble burst.

- Property transactions fell 34% to a six-year low of ¥1.72T ($15.78B), driven by the China economic slowdown, according to the Tokyo-based Urban Research Institute.

- Foreign buying made up over 30% of all real estate transactions a year earlier, but fell 90% to ¥91.9B. Relatively low prices had made Japanese real estate an attractive asset compared with property on other markets, but that perception has changed