Wealth

Indians seem to prefer Asian tax havens and not Switzerland, according to the bilateral foreign holdings data released by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), says an article in the Times of India.

Switzerland has always been infamous for storing most of the black money which is generated by evading tax. However, data suggests otherwise. About 53 percent of the offshore Indian wealth is kept in places within Asia such as Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Bahrain and Malaysia and only 31 percent of the Indians have their wealth stored in Swiss banks.

The wealth held offshore by wealthy Russians was equivalent to 75 percent of the country’s national income by 2015, a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) claims.

The NBER study, authored by prominent economists including Thomas Piketty, maps the distribution of income and wealth in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The millennial generation could be worth as much as $24 trillion in three years’ time, according to UBS, not bad when it’s roughly 1.5 times the size of the U.S. economy in 2015.

But the research shows a surprise: in the Middle East millennials are more hard-working and entrepreneurial compared to their global peers.

Global private wealth gained momentum in 2016, but wealth managers face a host of challenges if they hope to fight off competitors, deepen client loyalty, and put both revenue and profit growth on a sustainable positive trajectory, according to a new report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Switzerland remains the world’s No. 1 offshore wealth management hub with $2.4 trillion in assets, twice as much as Singapore’s, the report showed. BCG expects this number to rise to $2.8 trillion by 2021.

Invesco released its fifth Invesco Global Sovereign Asset Management Study on 5th June, an annual in-depth report on the complex investment behaviour of global sovereign wealth funds and central banks. This year’s study shows that geopolitical uncertainty and limited options to increase risk asset allocations are causing sovereign investors to make fewer allocation changes than at any point in the past five years, despite target-return gaps increasingly widening.

The survey, conducted face-to-face among 97 individual sovereigns and central bank reserve managers across the globe, including Canada, representing $12 trillion of assets, asked sovereigns to rate the importance of various economic and geopolitical factors on their investment strategies.

Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world. A top corporate CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 garment factory workers in Bangladesh. And the world’s 10 biggest corporations together have revenue greater than the 180 poorest countries combined, according to a study published Sunday by Oxfam.

The charity’s report, "An economy for the 99%", was released as global leaders and the business elite traveled to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum; it suggests the wealth gap is wider than ever, with new data for China and India indicating that the poorest half of the world owns less than previously estimated.