“The benign world of 2019 now seems a lifetime ago.”
Credit Suisse neatly sums up the collective opinion of nearly every living person in its latest global wealth report, published October 2020.
Many global lenders publish weighty wealth reports in the fourth quarter of the year. They use the occasion to look back at the events of the fading year and forward to the year to come. Here, we collate and distil the best of these big reports, in an attempt to explain, at a wealth level, what happened in 2020 and what to expect in 2021.
It is easy now to forget how serene – in this context – the world was before Covid hit. Credit Suisse describes 2019 as “an exceptional year for wealth creation”, with global wealth growing by $36.3 trillion over the course of the year to $399.2 trillion.
A stable economic environment and rising household wealth pushed the number of US-based dollar millionaires to 20.2 million, or 40% of the global total.
China cemented its place in second position in the table, with 5.8 million dollar millionaires, followed by Japan and the UK.
