The Plutonomy Is Doing Fine

Matias Vernengo

The new issue of the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report (2015) has been published. Below is the distribution of global wealth.

Nothing has changed much since we posted the previous version here. As I commented regarding the previous version, the poor are fundamentally in Africa, India, and Asia-Pacific (mainly Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Vietnam), while the wealthy are in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific (i.e. Japan). China has more people in the middle section of the wealth distribution than at the extremes.

Below is the Global Wealth Pyramid.

Not much difference from the previous one, but a bit worse. Now 71% of the population holds 3% of the wealth (before it was the 67% at the bottom who held 3.3% approximately). And the top 0.7% of the population holds slightly more than 45% of total wealth.

By the way, the U.S. has added more people at the top, while Japan and Europe have lost a few. If you are interested on how many really wealthy people there are (not the 34 million people at the top of the figure above, who are the ones worth more than 1 million), here is what the report says:

We estimate that there are 123,800 UHNW individuals worldwide, defined as those whose net worth exceeds USD 50 million. Of these, 44,900 are worth at least USD 100 million and 4,500 have assets above USD 500 million.

UHNW means Ultra-High Net Worth (or what a decade ago Citigroup analysts called the plutonomy). So about 4,500 with a net worth above $500 million.

Read the full report here.

Originally posted in two parts at Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) blog and Naked Keynesianism.

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