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Who wants to be a millionaire? “I don’t,” sang Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm in the 1956 film version of Cole Porter’s High Society. But there are a lot more of them in the world now than ever before – and not just because of inflation. The latest version of the annual Global Wealth Report published by the Swiss bank and asset manager, UBS, is out this week, and it makes mixed reading for Britons.
The basic message is that last year the world created nearly a million new dollar millionaires. Some 440,000 of them were in the US, so nearly half the total, but even here in the UK there were an additional 43,000. France, Spain, Japan and India all added more than 30,000 apiece. The reason is straightforward: global personal wealth grew by 10.8 per cent, the fastest since 2017. As a result, by the end of last year there were roughly 57.5 million millionaires in the world, with 23.6 million of them living in the US. There were 2.4 million in the UK, fewer than Germany or Japan, but more than France or Italy.
There are, however, some troubling qualifications to be made. One is that as a result of this asset boom, inequality has increased just about everywhere. If you look at median household wealth, that is the wealth of the middle family, with as many richer ones above it as there are poorer ones below, it has fallen in most places, including the UK. We have been particularly hit by inflation, as the principal asset of most people, our homes, has risen more slowly than prices in general. House prices are up 26 per cent since the beginning of 2020, but consumer prices are up 32 per cent. So the real wealth of an average Briton has, on UBS’s tally, fallen faster over the past five years than the average person in any other developed nation.
