Russians are unsurprised that number of their super-rich former comrades jumped in the last year, as the country is now home to 536 of what are called ultra high net worth households, a club to which entry is permitted only for those households whose private wealth begins to be counted at US$ 100 million.
Impressive for those who watch the flow of global riches, but the US, the land of millionaires for all of the last century, is in quite another league with 4,754 such households. These American lords (and those who will undoubtedly add to their numbers in the next few years) are expected, by the Boston Consulting Groups recent study of the extremely wealthy, to reach a combined sum of US$ 54 trillion of private financial wealth in 2018.
The growth of private wealth has accelerated (never mind what the World Bank has just said in its Global Economic Prospects) across most regions in 2013. As in 2012, the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan) represented the region in which such private wealth has grown fastest and this means not only that the ultra high net worth households have become richer, but that there are more of them crowding into what used to be, two generations ago, a small and fairly quiet club.
Looking ahead to 2018, wealth managers who dislike longer-term views in inverse proportion to the bonuses they make project global private wealth to post a compound annual growth rate of 5.4 per cent. What this means, for the rest of a world which ponders the question of income inequality and the soaring cost of living, is that global private wealth is expected to reach around US$ $198 trillion in 2018 (half of this will be in the Asia-Pacific region). When not so much if that happens, global private wealth will be more than three times as large as the combined GDPs, in 2018, of the worlds ten largest economies.
Such wealth-watching brings with it curious factlets. The highest density of millionaire households is in Qatar (175 out of every 1,000 households), followed by Switzerland (127) and Singapore (100). The USA has the largest number of billionaires, but the highest density of billionaire households is in Hong Kong (15.3 per million), followed by Switzerland (8.5 per million). In terms of growth rate India will show the highest rise, as the wealth of the richest households is forecast to grow 129 per cent, to go up from US$ 2 trillion to US$ 5 trillion.
For the private bankers and wealth managers, the latest in a growing number of rich list studies shows yet again that alls well that spends well.
Khaleej Times
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