The global wealth pyramid in 2015. 383 million adults (8 percent of the world) have net worth above USD 100,000. This group includes 34 million US dollar millionaires, who comprise less than 1 percent of the world's adult population, yet own 45 percent of all household wealth. Around 123,800 individuals within this group are worth more than USD 50 million, and 44,900 have over USD 100 million. Graphic: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2015

By Aimee Picchi
15 October 2015 (CBS News) – The likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould — the robber barons of the late 19th century — might feel right at home in today’s economy. 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 [pdf]. The top 1 percent has more than made up for the losses it suffered during the slump, when its control of world wealth slipped about 4 percentage points to just under 45 percent in 2007, the report noted. The world’s richest citizens, the study found, now own about one-half of global wealth.

Share of top wealth holders and share of financial assets (percentage), 2000–2015. The top 1 percent of global wealth holders started the millennium owning 48.9 percent of all household wealth. The top percentile share fell every year until it reached 44.2 percent in 2009, a drop of 4.7 percentage points. The downward trend then reversed and the share rose each year, overtaking the 2000 level in 2015. The top percentile now own half of all household assets in the world. Graphic: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2015

That means that the ultrawealthy have already reached a tipping point predicted by Oxfam earlier this year, when the charity forecast that the world’s wealthiest 1 percent would control half the world’s assets by 2016. It’s no wonder American workers and policymakers are concerned about the trend: The wealthiest are thriving at a time when everyone else — from the middle class on downward — are making do with less each year. The report’s findings weren’t reassuring on how the rise in inequality is hurting America’s middle class. The study noted that “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 adult population,” the report found. “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.” What’s happened to the once-fabled American middle class, the economic backbone of a country that now appears to have osteoporosis?

Percentage of wealth owned by middle-class adults, 2000–2015, by region. From 2008 onward, wealth growth has not allowed middle-class numbers to keep pace with population growth in the developing world. The distribution of wealth gains has shifted in favor of those at higher wealth levels. These two factors have combined to produce a decline in the share of middle-class wealth in every region since 2007 and a decline in all regions except China for the entire 2000–2015 period. Graphic: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2015

Even though America isn’t alone in having a middle class feeling the squeeze, that’s small comfort. Globally, the ranks of the middle class shrank during the recession, and they still haven’t recovered to their 2007 level, the report found.[…] 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. The second-richest group represents 7.4 percent of the global population, but it controls 39.4 percent of assets, or as much as $1 million per person. [more]

Guess who owns half the world’s assets