Not to be held back by the Great Recession, the world’s wealthiest individuals now own half of all wealth in the world. This is a level of wealth concentration that has not been seen for nearly one hundred years.
As CBS News explains:
The coffers of the uber-rich have exploded since the Great Recession, reaching a level “possibly not seen for almost a century,” according to a new report from Credit Suisse Research. The top 1 percent has more than made up for the losses it suffered during the slump, when control of world wealth slipped about 4 percentage points to just under 45 percent in 2007, the report noted.
The study also recognized that the rise in income inequality has negatively affected the U.S. middle class in particular. The study says, “The middle class in North America has less than average wealth, the only region for which this is true.”
“The middle class in the United States is also unusual in having a particularly low share of the country’s wealth, which at 19.6 percent is considerably less than its share of the population,” according to the report. “This is because the middle-class wealth share is squeezed by the exceptionally high wealth of the 12 percent of adults who are beyond the middle class.”
Globally, the trend is maintained, as CBS explains:
With the richest 1 percent now owning half the world’s assets, the rest of the income distribution isn’t coming out ahead. The bottom 71 percent of the world’s population controls just 3 percent of the globe’s wealth, giving each person in that lowest level less than $10,000 per person in assets. The middle 21 percent own 12.5 percent of the world’s wealth, or less than $100,000 per person.
For more on this, read the article from CBS News titled: “Guess who owns half the world’s assets.“
