Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Worldwide Wealthy

It should be no surprise that wealthy people around the world have had it just as bad, if not worse, than the wealthy here in the United States. The economic downturn was worse in Europe, obviously, than it was here. That's a big reason that the World Wealth Report 2012 found that the aggregate wealth of high-net-worth people around the world declined by 1.7 percent last year.


To be sure, the overall number of millionaires rose, by 0.8 percent. But the higher you go on the wealth scale, the more that people felt the economic downturn. Worldwide, people with more than $30 million in investable assets saw their wealth decline by 4.9 percent. The raw number of people with $30 million or more declined by  2.5 percent.


The big culprit here is an almost unprecedented level of volatility. Last year was the second-most volatile for worldwide markets in the past 15 years, with global equity market capitalization dropping by 18.7 percent..

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