Mapping Global Wealth: Credit Suisse reveals the world's staggering inequality
Credit Suisse in its first-ever Global Wealth Report crunches data for over 200 countries and maps the wealth belonging to the world’s richest people—and everybody else. Here are the facts:
- We’ve got just over 1,000 billionaires and another 80,000 “ultra high net worth individuals” worth over $50 million each. We can add into this wealthy summit another 24 million adults worth between $1 million and $50 million.
- At other end of the global spectrum sit three billion people—more than two thirds of the world’s adults—whose wealth averages less than $10,000. About 1.1 billion of them have a net worth of less than $1,000.
- Half the people on earth who are 20 and older hold under $4,000 in net worth, after subtracting debts from assets. They wield less than 2 percent of global wealth.
- Meanwhile, the world’s richest 1 percent—adults who have at least $588,000 to call their own—hold 43 percent of the world’s wealth.
No other nation, to be sure, holds as much total wealth as the United States. With only 5.2 percent of the world’s population, the United States boasts 23 percent of the world’s adults worth at least $100,000 and an even greater proportion, 41 percent, of the world’s millionaires.
“The past decade has been especially conducive to the establishment and preservation of large fortunes,” Credit Suisse sums up. Banking giants may be able to live comfortably with that reality, but the rest of us need to change it.
