Germany’s Die Zeit allowed itself yesterday a bit of gloating: Europe takes over from North America as richest region. It’s all due to the Great Recession: North American wealth is to a much greater proportion held in equities, whose values lately have plummeted, so that assets under managment (AuM) there fell by 21.8% in 2008 to $29.3 trillion, while in Europe AuM fell in the same period by merely 5.8%, to $32.7 trillion. Latin America was the only region where AuM increased despite the adverse economic conditions, by 3%.
All of this, and more, is information forthcoming from a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, which the BCG is kind enough to discuss at length here, in English, so you can consider those previous and the study’s other findings at your convenience. (For example, the US still has the most “millionaire households,” at almost 4 million, although they are thicker on the ground in Singapore, where a full 8.5% of all households own more than $1 million.) Indeed, not only is the BCG itself willing to state figures to one decimal place, while Die Zeit for whatever reason tends to round up to the nearest whole number, but the former also makes use of the American/British system of big numbers (thousands, millions, billions, trillions) that you are probably more used to (and whose differences with the continental European system I had occasion to discuss here previously).
