[LINK] Aussies wealthiest people in the world

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Why Aussies are world's wealthiest

ANDREW MAIN http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/ OCT 10, 2013 (snip)


AUSTRALIANS are per capita the wealthiest people in the world, according to 
a report yesterday by Zurich-based bank Credit Suisse.

The country's wealth is also more evenly distributed across the population, 
the report says.

The median wealth for every Australian is $US219,505.

The median is the midpoint between the poorest and the richest, and 
Australia's ranking reflected the fact that Australian wealth was shared 
more widely than in some rich countries, said David McDonald, chief 
investment strategist in Australia for Credit Suisse Private Banking.

"The top 10 per cent of Australians own 50 per cent of the wealth. This 
compares with the top 10 per cent around the world owning an average of 86 
per cent and the top 10 per cent in the US owning 74 per cent."

The report finds Australia's mean wealth per adult, or average, is just 
over $US400,000, beaten only by Switzerland, and there are 1.12 million 
Australians classed as US-dollar millionaires, although that includes all 
net assets including housing and superannuation.

That is the same number of millionaires as in China. In 2011, there were 
1.079 million in Australia compared with 1.017 million in China.

The report says there are 1.76 million Australians in the top 1 per cent of 
global wealth holders, accounting for 3.8 per cent of that group despite 
this country having only 0.4 per cent of the world's adult population.

Of those rich Australians, the report says 2059 of them are ultra-high-net-
worth individuals, defined as having personal wealth exceeding $US50m. 
That's 2.1 per cent of the global total that is dominated by the US with 
46.3 per cent.

A surprise was that personal extreme wealth is not static: fewer than two-
thirds of the Forbes magazine billionaires from 2000-01 were still on that 
list five years later and "barely half of them were on it by the end of the 
decade", the report says.

The growing influence of the Asia-Pacific region is shown by the report's 
prediction that the US will have total personal wealth of $US100 trillion 
by 2018, $10 trillion less than the Asia-Pacific. The region is currently 
worth $US73.9 trillion and is expected to overtake the US in 2017. Most of 
the growth is expected to come from China, whose wealth by 2018 is expected 
to reach the level the US was at in 1993.
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Cheers,
Stephen