One nation — the United States — is driving this incredibly top-heavy statistical picture. Some 38 percent of the world’s millionaires call the USA home. China, the next largest contributor to the global millionaire population, claims just 11 percent. Japan and France, the next two highest millionaire manufacturers, each claim only 5 percent of our globe’s at least seven-digit set.
Worldwide, about a quarter-million individuals — 243,060, to be exact — qualify for Credit Suisse’s more exclusive “ultra-high-net-worth” status. These ultras each hold at least $50 million in personal wealth, and over half of them, 51 percent, hail from the United States. That U.S. ultra-rich share nearly quadruples China’s ultra-rich population, the world’s second largest.
America’s richest of the rich, in short, dominate the ranks of our global deep-pockets. But the rest of us Americans, cheerleaders for our rich love to assure us, have no cause for unease about that domination. The more wealth that America’s wealthy accumulate, their reasoning goes, the more our rich can invest in creating better futures for ordinary working Americans.
The latest Credit Suisse numbers totally undercut that claim. In other developed nations — societies with the rich holding significantly smaller shares of their national wealth than in the United States — typical people have seen substantially greater growth rates in their personal wealth.
Back in the year 2000, the typical American had a net worth of $46,479. The typical net worth of French adults that year: $51,360. By the end of 2022, the typical French adult held $145,591 in personal wealth. The typical — median — U.S. adult wealth last year: just $107.739. Over that same two-decade-plus span, the typical Dutch median net worth jumped from $44,513 to $120,270, the typical Canadian from $37,295 to $143,862.
The spectacular wealth of America’s wealthy, in other words, is paying no great dividends for average Americans. Those dividends are funneling instead to the top of the U.S. economic ladder.
Just one final illustrative example of that dynamic from the new 2023 Global Wealth Report: Japan’s top 1 percenters hold 18.8 percent of their nation’s wealth. The U.S. top 1 percent wealth share? Almost twice as much: 34.2 percent.
Japan’s most typical adults, meanwhile, hold personal net worths of $124,258, some 15 percent higher than the $107,739 U.S. wealth median.
How much more unequal can the United States get? The researchers behind the annual Global Wealth Report can’t answer that question. Only we Americans can.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.
Sam Pizzigati | Radio Free (2023-08-21T05:58:18+00:00) New Stats, Same Story: Our Rich are Raking. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/21/new-stats-same-story-our-rich-are-raking/
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