By the Numbers: The 1% now owns half the world’s wealth
Toronto – November 23, 2017 – Global wealth inequality has reached another shameful milestone as the richest one percent now owns slightly more than half of the world’s wealth, according to the latest edition of the Global Wealth Report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute (CSRI). What about the 99%?
50.1%
The wealthiest 1 per cent now owns a little more than half, 50.1%, of all global household wealth.
6.4%
Total global wealth growth increased by 6.4 per cent to US$28 trillion in the past twelve months – the fastest rate since 2012.
4.4%
Household wealth grew at a slower pace in Canada, compared with the world average; up 4.4 per cent in a year.
27%
Total global wealth increased by 27 per cent since the onset of financial crisis a decade ago.
0.36 percenters
These are adults with a net worth of more than $50 million each. There are about 124,000 such individuals in the world.
1,078,000
The number of millionaires in Canada grew by 9.5 per cent in the past two years, from 984,000 in 2015.
$16.7 trillion
The wealthy in the United States saw the biggest gains, accumulating more than half of the $16.7 trillion in new wealth created since 2008. Two-fifths of the world’s millionaires live in the US, followed by Japan with 7% and the UK with 6%.
71%
3.5 billion people, or about 71 per cent of the globe’s adult population, each own less than US$10,000 in wealth, representing together about 2.7 per cent of the world’s wealth.
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Inequality is edging upwards in most developing economies of Africa, Latin America and Pacific-Asia, where median wealth fell again this year.
Millennials have poorer prospects to gain the same level of wealth as their parents, the report warns, mainly due to the destruction of wealth during the financial crisis of 2008-09; higher unemployment rates; rising house prices; increasing inequality and lower income mobility; and less access to retirement pensions.
Source: Global Wealth Report 2017: Where Are We Ten Years after the Crisis?
