With the recovery of share prices last year, a million more people – a 10% increase – have now been categorised as high net worth individuals, according to research by the Royal Bank of Canada and consultancy Capgemini.
Due to the recovering property market, the US regained its place at the top of the league table in the report, with 3.73m HNWIs, up by more than 11.5% on 2011. The Asia-Pacific region was second with 3.68m HNWIs, up by more than 9% on the year.
Europe, where the economy of the single currency zone has now been in recession for 18 months, saw a smaller rise of 7.5% in 2012 and Britain is home to the fifth-largest group with 465,000 HNWIs, up from 441,000 in 2011.
The research categorised the HNWIs according to their wealth. There was an increase of 11% in 2012 in the number of the richest ultra high net worth individuals. These 110,000 people are worth $30m or more, and hold assets worth more than $16tn between them.
Just over a million people held $10tn-worth of assets between them, while a much larger group of 10.8m people held assets worth $1m-$3m.
Between them, this total of twelve million people owned assets worth $46.2tn (£29.5tn) – more than three times the entire annual output from the US economy.
The research also forecast that the rich will continue getting richer, with the total wealth held by this group expected to expand by 6.5% a year over the next three years.
The research indicates that HNWIs are a relatively conservative group. They managed their assets cautiously in 2012, while fewer than half of them said they trusted financial markets, and fewer than 40% trusted regulators. There was an overall tendency towards safety and wealth preservation from all wealth levels, indicating perhaps a generally lower level of trust in the financial markets.
Source: Royal Bank of Canada/Capgemini/The Guardian
