Sunday, April 1, 2012

Citi Private Bank: "Wealth Report 2012" (why do the rich favor London and New York?)

From Barron's Penta blog:
..Citi Private Bank and the London-based real estate advisors, Knight Frank , just came out with their Wealth Report 2012,  a study of the globe’s ultra rich and where they are buying property. Consider it a global version of Penta’s much-read annual list, Best Places for Second Homes. It makes for an interesting read.
According to Ledbury Research, there are 63,000 people globally in possession of $100 million or more in assets, with 18,000 centa-millionaires located in South East Asia, China and Japan. That compares with 17,000 in North America and 14,000 in Western Europe. The number of centa-millionaires rose 29% globally between 2006 and 2011, with the U.S. accounting for a 6% rise.

Applying their pencil scratching to regional GDP-growth projections for the coming years, the wealth researchers figure that by 2016, the U.S. will still have the most centa-millionaires on a country-by-country basis, with 17,100, but probably not for much longer after that. China, it is assumed, will in that short time double its number of centa-millionaires to 14,000. It’s all, of course, about the globe’s wealth-creation center of gravity shifting from somewhere in the mid-Atlantic to somewhere over in Asia. It’s the ongoing and painful global restructuring we read about in the newspapers every day....MORE
The Wealth Report 2012 (68 page PDF)