20 million millionaires: offspring in the club of the rich

The richest people in the world have survived the Corona year 2020 brilliantly: If you already have a lot of money, it flies to you. The boom in the stock markets is making the cash registers of the super-rich ring.

According to a study by the consulting firm Capgemini, the mark of 20 million millionaires worldwide was exceeded for the first time last year. The number of people who have investable assets of at least one million dollars rose by 6.3 percent compared to the previous year to 20.8 million, the experts have calculated.

If the total of 20.8 million millionaires worldwide throw their wealth together, that results in a total of almost 80,000 billion dollars (plus 7.6 percent), which corresponds to around 67,000 billion euros. For comparison: if they decided to pay off the national debts of the US and Germany, there would still be $ 50,000 billion left for one or more lives of prosperity.

Who do the stock market records benefit?

In Germany, too, the rich got richer during the crisis. The club of dollar millionaires in this country grew by 69,100 people or 4.7 percent to more than 1.5 million members. Total assets rose 6.8 percent to approximately $ 5,850 billion. In 2019, the number had increased by 8.8 percent.

At the top of the countries with the most dollar millionaires is the USA, followed by Japan, Germany and China. Together, these countries account for almost 63 percent of the world’s wealthy. The Capgemini experts cite bullish stock markets and rising property prices as reasons for the global increase.

From the rich and the super-rich

There are differences within the class of millionaires: The wealth of the super-rich grew the most in 2020 with a good nine percent. The super-rich are people who have investable assets of at least $ 30 million.

Recently published studies on the topic of wealth come to a similar conclusion, even if the numbers are not identical due to differences in the methodology.

In the annual “World Wealth Report”, Capgemini takes into account stocks, fixed-income securities, alternative investments such as private equity capital, cash and real estate, provided they are not used by the company itself. Capgemini does not care about the question of how the wealth is distributed.

DIW study on asset concentration

In a study from July last year, the experts at DIW looked at the concentration of wealth in Germany. They came to the conclusion that the concentration of individual net wealth in Germany was higher than previously reported.

The top ten percent would therefore own a good two thirds of the net assets. The richest percent of the population alone unites around 35 percent of the wealth. In the DIW’s calculations, net assets mean gross assets minus debts.

If one wants to counteract the very unequal distribution of wealth, also in international comparison, the accumulation of wealth should be supported across the population, was the conclusion of the DIW at the time. Markus Grabka, one of the authors of the study, stated: “State incentives to build wealth should be preferred to greater redistribution from top to bottom.”