Millionaires now control half of the World’s Personal Wealth

The pool of money held by the world’s wealthiest people grew by 12 percent last year to nearly $202 trillion as bull markets and the dollar’s weakening against most major currencies boosted global fortunes, an international advisory firm’s study released on Thursday said.

Adjusted for exchange rate swings, wealth rose 7 percent, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) survey found.

In other words, as Bloomberg put it, “The rich are getting a lot richer and doing so a lot faster.”

That’s especially true in the United States, where the Trump administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are working to keep slashing taxes on the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations at the expense of working families.

While residents of North America held the greatest share of personal wealth at almost 43 percent, the fastest growth came in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Most super-rich individuals lived in the United States, China and Japan.

The business of providing advice to those super-rich is still strong in North America.

However, legacy retail brokerages such as Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, UBS AG Group’s Wealth Management in the Americas and Wells Fargo Advisors lost market share as less wealthy clients went elsewhere.

Legacy brokerages’ market share fell to 37 percent in 2016 from 41 percent in 2012, while the portion held by direct channel firms such as Charles Schwab and Fidelity grew modestly to 21 percent from 20 percent.

More than 35 million Americans now have between $250,000 and $1 million, a wealth bracket the industry calls mass affluent. BCG senior partner Brent Beardsley said that many mass affluent savers hold a lot of their money in a retirement account, like a 401(k), which oftentimes are managed by a company like Schwab or Fidelity.

“(They have) a natural structural advantage” over legacy brokerages, Beardsley said.

Although China currently has fewer millionaires and billionaires than the United States, the report’s lead author Anna Zakrzewski told Bloomberg that researchers expect the number of Chinese millionaires to increase four times as fast as in the United States. “China will continue to experience similar growth as in the past,” she said, “and this will mean that over the next five years, there will be more wealth created in China than in the U.S.”

But no matter where the wealth is created, it will likely remain concentrated in the hands of the world’s richest people. As Common Dreams previously reported, an Oxfam study published in January found that during 2017, “a new billionaire was created every two days.” According to that report, “82 percent of all wealth created went to the top 1 percent of the world’s richest while zero percent—absolutely nothing—went to the poorest half of the global population.”

BCG’s annual study also showed Switzerland remained the world’s biggest center for managing offshore wealth with $2.3 trillion, followed by Hong Kong with $1.1 trillion and Singapore with $0.9 trillion.

The two Asian centers have grown at yearly rates of 11 and 10 percent respectively over the past five years, more than three times the 3 percent rate Switzerland has posted.

It is in the fast-growing markets that large wealth managers including Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse are casting wider nets.

The Swiss banking secrecy from which they long profited has been weakened, meaning rich people from around the world can no longer easily use the Alpine Republic to stash wealth away from tax authorities at home.

The changes have put Switzerland in fierce competition with faster-growing centers like Hong Kong and Singapore.