(C) Common Dreams
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New Stats, Old Story: Our Rich Are Raking It In [1]
['Sam Pizzigati']
Date: 2023-09
Five-star hotels. So yesterday. Today’s super rich, the Wall Street Journal reports, are picking palatial luxury villas over swanky suites when they need a quick pick-me-up.
Italy, France, and Greece currently offer the widest array of villa options, but Portugal seems to be catching up fast. So many options!
How can our deepest pockets find the right one? A “high-end travel consultant,” the Robb Report on luxury living points out, can identify just the perfect villa vacation. The cost for joining the circle that can access one top consultant’s advice: $25,000 in annual fees on top of a $150,000 joining fee.
The cost of actually renting a high-end villa? The realtor agency Oliver’s Travels was offering at one point this summer three dozen villas renting for over $130,000 a week.
How many people on our Earth today can afford to put down — without batting an eye — that sort of cash? Some of our best annual stats on our global super rich have been coming out, over recent years, from the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse. But this fabled 167-year-old institution stumbled royally during the pandemic and, earlier this year, ended up the property of its Swiss rival UBS.
UBS, fortunately, has opted to continue Credit Suisse’s annual Global Wealth Report tradition, and the 2023 edition — covering data through 2022 — has just appeared. As usual, this annual report’s release has enjoyed substantial media coverage worldwide, especially in the business press.
Most all the latest coverage has generally emphasized the news in the 2023 report’s opening lines. As one typical headline, from Bloomberg, reads: “Global Wealth Fell Last Year for First Time Since 2008.”
Wealth per global adult, the new Global Wealth Report does indeed show, fell by 3.6 percent in 2022. But most of that decline, the report goes on to add, “came from the appreciation of the US dollar against many other currencies.” Hold those exchange rates constant and the story changes. Wealth per adult increases by 2.2 percent.
This year’s Global Wealth Report actually has a much more important story to tell than the global wealth per adult, and the global media coverage has by and large missed it. That story: The world’s distribution of wealth remains remarkably top-heavy. Individuals with less than $10,000 to their name — 52.5 percent of the world’s adult population — hold just 1.2 percent of the world’s assets.
Those numbers almost exactly reverse at the other end of the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s “global wealth pyramid.” The 1.1 percent of the global adult population worth over $1 million individually holds 45.8 percent of the world’s wealth.
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[1] Url:
https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-stats-old-story-our-rich-are-raking/
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