More than half of Swiss adults have assets worth more than $100,000, 11 percent of the country’s adults are US-dollar millionaires and an estimated 3,800 individuals are ultra-high-net-worth individuals with wealth over $50 million, the report says.
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A new research report by Credit Suisse says 1% of the population now owns half the world’s wealth as global inequality grows.
Credit Suisse said that at the same time middle income earners have seen their wealth squeezed.
There are 34 million people, with a collective net worth of at least $1 million that make up 0.7 per cent of the world’s adult population accounting for 45 per cent of the world’s wealth. “Are we really happy to live in a world where the top 1 percent own half the wealth and the poorest half own just 1 percent?”
South Africa’s ranking has been mostly owing to a rapid growth in the middle class, which now comprises 13.7% of the population.
In Singapore, forex fluctuations trimmed total household wealth by 5.8 per cent to US$1 trillion. Central banks have pumped $5 trillion into the global economy through their various quantitative easing programs, and yet the world still seems at risk of tumbling back into recession. It uses the United States as the benchmark country where a middle-class adult is defined as having wealth between $50,000 and $500,000 valued at mid-2015 prices, while using the global Monetary Fund series of purchasing power parity (PPP) values to derive equivalent middle-class wealth bounds in local purchasing power terms for other countries. The report also examines middle-class wealth. “Wealth is (nevertheless) still predominantly concentrated in Europe and the United States”.
“Wealth inequality has continued to increase since 2008, with the top percentile of wealth holders now owning 50.4 per cent of all household wealth”, the report said.
“The global economic outlook is weaker than previously expected, and this leads us to revise our projections downwards”.
U.S. wealth rose $4.6 trillion, despite a global decline of $12.7 trillion, with Japan, Russian Federation and the European Union countries showing the biggest drops, largely because of currency depreciation.
The U.S., another country with massive disparities in riches, “will remain the undisputed leader in terms of wealth, holding almost a third of the global total”.
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In August, data from Barclay’s bank showed that the number of United Kingdom millionaires had shot up by 41 per cent over the past five years.
