Richest Two Percent Own Half World

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER). The UNU-WIDER study is the first of its kind to cover all countries in the world and all major components of household wealth, including financial assets and debts, land, buildings and other tangible property.

The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.

The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club.

2016 Finance, not tech, is driving growth in U.S. billionaires

Finance isn’t the biggest source of U.S. billionaires, they found. That remains inherited wealth (29%, down from 52% in 1996) and company founders (32%, little changed from 1996). A new source of U.S. billionaires are those with connections to politics or to resources (primarily natural-resource extraction and energy), at nearly 4% in 2014 compared to none in 1996. The wealthiest person in each nation tends to have inherited their money.

2016 The wealth disparity between the world’s richest and poorest has worsened to the point that 62 of the richest people in the world now own as much as the poorest half of the planet combined, according to Oxfam. Their report titled “An Economy for the 1%” reveals that the poorest half of the world’s 3.6 billion people has become poorer by 38% — a loss of $1 trillion — since 2010, while the richest 62 people have increased in wealth by more than half a trillion dollars to now own $1.76 trillion.
With the assistance of global tax havens, the richest 1% have enabled themselves to have even more wealth than the remaining 99%. A staggering $7.6 trillion was kept hidden by the wealthy with the help of the tax haven network. The first step in solving this crisis in wealth distribution, according to Oxfam GB chief executive Mark Goldring, is a crackdown on these global tax havens. “It is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world population owns no more than a small group of the global super-rich – so few, you could fit them all on a single coach,” he said. “World leaders’ concern about the escalating inequality crisis has so far not translated into concrete action to ensure that those at the bottom get their fair share of economic growth. In a world where one in nine people go to bed hungry every night we cannot afford to carry on giving the richest an ever bigger slice of the cake. “We need to end the era of tax havens which has allowed rich individuals and multinational companies to avoid their responsibilities to society by hiding ever increasing amounts of money offshore.”

Why Trump Became President
What happened with Chinese imports is an example of how much of the conventional wisdom about economics that held sway in the late 1990s, including the role of trade, technology and central banking, has since slowly unraveled. The aftershocks are sowing deep-seated political discontent this election year. Disillusionment with globalization has fed one of the most unconventional political seasons in modern history, with Bernie Sanders and especially Donald Trump tapping into potent anti-free-trade sentiment. Both presidential candidates aimed much of their criticism at 1994’s North American Free Trade Agreement, which boosted imports from Mexico. Even then, though, the real culprit was China, eCONomists now say. No other country came close to its combination of a vast working-age population, super-low wages, government support, cheap currency and productivity gains. It was a catastrophic mistake. Mr. Trump won 89 of the 100 counties most affected by competition from China.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-china-shock-deep-and-swift-spurred-the-rise-of-trump-1470929543

THE RICHEST 85 PEOPLE OWN AS MUCH AS THE 3.5 BILLION POOREST PEOPLE [see PDF]

This research will give you a pretty good idea of who they are.

THE RICHEST BILLIONAIRS UNDER 35 1% Under 35

2020 Amazon made $10.8 billion in profits, didn't pay a dime in federal taxes, and got a $129 million check from the IRS—courtesy of Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate.

Mark Zuckerberg, 30, maintained his top spot on the list of the richest individuals under the age of 35. His net worth is estimated at $34 billion, landing at No. 11 on the Forbes list of richest billionaires in America and the 14th richest in the world.
Evan Spiegel Age: 24 Worth: Around $1.5 billion How he made his billions: The CEO and co-founder of Snapchat, a photo-messaging app, turned down a $3 billion cash offer from Facebook in 2013 and now runs a company worth an estimated $10 billion.
Bobby Murphy Age: 25 Worth: Around $1.5 billion How he made his billions: This co-founder of photo-messaging app Snapchat -- along with fellow billionaire youngster Evan Spiegel -- is the company's chief technology officer.
Albert von Thurn und Taxis Age: 31 Worth: Around $1.5 billion How he made his billions: A German prince, he inherited his billions on his 18th birthday in 2001. His diversified assets include art, timber and real estate. He remains a bachelor and spends his time racing cars for a German league.
Marie Besnier-Beauvalot Age: 33 Worth: Around $2.7 billion How she made her billions: She and her siblings inherited a French dairy company founded by her grandfather. The siblings now own 100 percent of the company and run it together.
Elizabeth Holmes Age: 30 Worth: Around $4.5 billion How she made her billions: The richest self-made female billionaire and a newcomer to the Forbes list, Holmes founded a blood-testing company, Theranos, in 2003.
Eduardo Saverin Age: 32 Worth: Around $4.9 billion How he made his billions: Coming from a wealthy family, Saverin sued Zuckerberg after co-founding the social site and not being given credit for it. He settled out of court. He still is a part owner of Facebook and also is an angel investor for other companies.
Yang Huiyan Age: 33 Worth: Around $4.9 billion How she made her billions: Yang Huiyan's father, Yeung Kwok Keung, created the high-end Chinese real estate development company Country Garden Group. Prior to the company's Hong Kong IPO in 2007, Keung transferred his shares to his daughter. She is in charge of the company's development strategies.
Scott Duncan Age: 32 Worth: Around $6.2 billion How he made his billions: Duncan inherited his money from his father, Dan Duncan, who started energy pipeline company Enterprise Products. One of four children, Scott Duncan's fortune grew by $1 billion last year after company stock rose.
Dustin Moskovitz Age: 30 Worth: Around $8.1 billion How he made his billions: Another youngin' gilded by Facebook's popularity, Moskovitz worked on the site in its early stages with Zuckerberg.

Wealth Inequality

2015 Great Visualization -- Who & where are the 200 largest companies in the world?

2014 The World's Wealthiest
There are about 200,000 people with more than $30 million in assets dotted around the globe and much of that money is concentrated in five countries, according to Wealth-X, a Singapore-based company that tracks the world’s UHNW population. Globally, these super-rich hold $27.7 trillion in assets, with a staggering 83% of that held in the US, Germany and Japan.

2013 WEALTHIEST INDIVIDUAL IN EACH U.S. STATE

Indiana, taught me about inequality. By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ JULY/AUGUST 2014
So when I went off to college to study economics, I was astonished by what I read. The standard economic texts of the time seemed to be unrelated to the reality I had witnessed growing up in Gary. They said that unemployment shouldn’t exist and that the market led to the best of all possible worlds. But if that were the case, I decided, I wanted to live in a different world. While other economists were obsessed with extolling the virtues of the market economy, I focused a lot of my work on why markets fail, and I devoted much of my Ph.D. thesis at MIT to understanding the causes of inequality.

Commerce Without Conscience
<must read> The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats by Nick Hanauer The .01%ers, are proud and unapologetic capitalists. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast.

5/15/14 Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century, tells us about his study of the history of income and wealth since the 18th century.

Fortune 500 companies receive $63 billion in subsidies - CORPORATE WELFARE

That’s the takeaway from a new study of 25,000 major taxpayer subsidy deals over the last two decades. Entitled “Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” the report from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First shows that the largest corporations in the world aren’t models of self-sufficiency and unbridled capitalism. To the contrary, they continue to receive tens of billions of dollars in government handouts. Such subsidies might be a bit more defensible if they were being doled out in a way that promoted upstart entrepreneurialism. But as the study also shows, a full “three-quarters of all the economic development dollars awarded and disclosed by state and local governments have gone to just 965 large corporations” — not to the small businesses and startups that politicians so often pretend to care about. The true beneficiaries of subsidies are often hidden under layers of holding companies, shell firms and complex ownership agreements. But Good Jobs First did the tedious work of connecting the subsidies to the parent firms. In the process, the group discovered that a whopping $110 billion — or 75 percent of cumulative disclosed subsidy dollars — are going to these 965 large companies. Fortune 500 firms alone receive more than 16,000 subsidies at a total cost of $63 billion. Additionally, eight out of the top 20 firms receiving U.S. taxpayer subsidies are not even U.S. companies, meaning American taxpayers are being forced to directly subsidize foreign firms. Consider Koch Industries. Despite the Koch Brothers being the biggest financiers of the anti-government right, and despite their billing as libertarian “free market” activists, their company has relied on $88 million worth of government subsidies.

One should be clear about what is meant by “wealth”,’

say co-authors James Davies of the University of Western Ontario, Anthony Shorrocks and Susanna Sandstrom of UNU-WIDER, and Edward Wolff of New York University. ‘In everyday conversation the term “wealth” often signifies little more than “money income”. On other occasions economists use “wealth” to refer to the value of all household resources, including human capabilities.’

We use the term in its long-established sense of net worth: the value of physical and financial assets less debts. In this respect, wealth represents the ownership of capital. Although capital is only one part of personal resources, it is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household wellbeing and economic success, and more broadly on economic development and growth.’

Wealth levels across countries

Using currency exchange rates, global household wealth amounted to $125 trillion in the year 2000, equivalent to roughly three times the value of total global production (GDP) or to $20,500 per person. Adjusting for differences in the cost-of-living across nations raises the value of wealth to $26,000 per capita when measured in terms of purchasing power parity dollars (PPP$).

The world map shows per capita wealth of different countries. (Figure 1: World Wealth Levels in Year 2000 Average wealth amounted to $144,000 per person in the USA in year 2000, and $181,000 in Japan. Lower down among countries with wealth data are India, with per capita assets of $1,100, and Indonesia with $1,400 per capita.

Per capita wealth levels vary widely across countries. Even within the group of high-income OECD nations the range includes $37,000 for New Zealand and $70,000 for Denmark and $127,000 for the UK.

Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe, and high income Asia-Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90% of total world wealth. (Figure 2: Regional Wealth Shares

Although North America has only 6% of the world adult population, it accounts for 34% of household wealth. Europe and high income Asia-Pacific countries also own disproportionate amounts of wealth. In contrast, the overall share of wealth owned by people in Africa, China, India, and other lower income countries in Asia is considerably less than their population share, sometimes by a factor of more than ten. (Figure 3: Population and Wealth Shares by Region>

The study finds wealth to be more unequally distributed than income across countries. High income countries tend to have a bigger share of world wealth than of world GDP. The reverse is true of middle- and low-income nations. However, there are exceptions to this rule, for example the Nordic region and transition countries like the Czech Republic and Poland.

The authors of the UNU-WIDER study explain that in Eastern European countries ‘private wealth is on the rise, but has still not reached very high levels. Assets like private pensions and life insurance are held by relatively few households. In the Nordic countries, the social security system provides generous public pensions that may depress wealth accumulation.’

World wealth inequality

The concentration of wealth within countries varies significantly but is generally high. The share of the top 10% ranges from around 40% in China to 70% in the United States, and higher still in other countries.

The Gini value, which measures inequality on a scale from zero to one, gives numbers in the range from 35% to 45% for income inequality in most countries. In contrast, Gini values for wealth inequality are usually between 65% and 75%, and sometimes exceed 80%.

Two high wealth economies, Japan and the United States, show very different patterns of wealth inequality, with Japan having a wealth Gini of 55% and the USA a wealth Gini of around 80%.

Wealth inequality for the world as a whole is higher still. The study estimates that the global wealth Gini for adults is 89%. The same degree of inequality would be obtained if one person in a group of ten takes 99% of the total pie and the other nine share the remaining 1%.

Measuring financial inclusion : the Global Findex Database

Approximately 2.5 billion adults worldwide don't have a formal banking account.

In developing economies, only 41 percent of adults have bank accounts (compared to nearly 90 percent in high-income countries).

In developing countries, the wealthiest 20 percent are more than twice as likely to have an account as the lowest 20 percent.

There's a gender inequality as well: 46 percent of men in poorer countries have a formal account, while only 37 percent of women do.

Where do the world’s wealthy live?

FYI The wealthy can get their home blurred out of google <censored> the rest of the 99% have their privacy invaded.

According to the study, almost all of the world’s richest individuals live in North America, Europe, and rich Asia-Pacific countries. Each of these groups of countries contribute about one third of the members of the world’s wealthiest 10%. (Figure 4: Regional Composition of Global Wealth Distribution

China occupies much of the middle third of the global wealth distribution, while India, Africa, and low-income Asian countries dominate the bottom third.

For all developing regions of the world, the share of population exceeds the share of global wealth, which in turn exceeds the share of members of the wealthiest groups. (Figure 3: Population and Wealth Shares by Region

A small number of countries account for most of the wealthiest 10% in the world. One-quarter are Americans and another 20% are Japanese. (Figure 5: Percentage Membership of Wealthiest 10%

These two countries feature even more strongly among the richest 1% of individuals in the world, with 37% residing in the USA and 27% in Japan. (Figure 6: Percentage Membership of Wealthiest 1%

According to Anthony Shorrocks, a country’s representation in the rich person’s club depends on three factors: the size of the population, average wealth, and wealth inequality.

The USA and Japan stand out’, he says, ‘because they have large populations and high average wealth. Although Switzerland and Luxembourg have high average wealth, their populations are small. China on the other hand fails to feature strongly among the super-rich because average wealth is modest and wealth is evenly spread by international standards. However, China is already likely to have more wealthy residents than our data reveals for the year 2000, and membership of the super-rich seems set to rise fast in the next decade.’

Composition of household wealth

The UNU-WIDER study shows major international differences in the composition of assets, resulting from different influences on household behaviour such as market structure, regulation, and cultural preferences.

Real property, particularly land and farm assets, are more important in less developed countries. (Figure 7: Asset Composition in Selected Countries This reflects not only the greater importance of agriculture, but also immature financial institutions.

The study also reveals striking differences in the types of financial assets owned. Savings accounts feature strongly in transition economies and in some rich Asian countries, while share-holdings and other types of financial assets are more evident in rich countries in the West.(Figure 8: Composition of Financial Wealth in Selected Countries

According to the authors of the UNU-WIDER study, savings accounts tend to be favoured in Asian countries because ‘there appears to be a strong preference for liquidity and a lack of confidence in financial markets. Other types of financial assets are more prominent in countries like the UK and USA which have well developed financial sectors and which rely heavily on private pensions.’

Surprisingly, household debt is relatively unimportant in poor countries. As the authors of the study point out: ‘While many poor people in poor countries are in debt, their debts are relatively small in total. This is mainly due to the absence of financial institutions that allow households to incur large mortgage and consumer debts, as is increasingly the situation in rich countries’

The authors go on to note that ‘many people in high-income countries have negative net worth and—somewhat paradoxically—are among the poorest people in the world in terms of household wealth.’

Source: United Nations University

Authors of The World Distribution of Household Wealth, December 2006

James Davies is a Professor, and the RBC Financial Group Fellow, in the Department of Economics at the University of Western Ontario. He is the Director of the UNU-WIDER project on Personal Assets from a Global Perspective. davies@...

Susanna Sandströmis a Research Associate at UNU-WIDER. She has previously held positions at the Luxemburg Income Study and Statistics Finland. sandstrom@...

Anthony Shorrocks is the Director of WIDER and has previously held positions at the LSE and University of Essex.

Edward Wolff is Professor of Economics, New York University, Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. Edward Wolff

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