Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 9th of September 2018 to The Sounding Line.

As the following chart from Statista illustrates, Hong Kong has finally overtaken New York City as home to the World’s most ultra-rich. Ultra-High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) are defined as people with a net worth over $30 million and their numbers are growing rapidly. In the past year alone, the number of ultra rich grew by 13% to 255,810 individuals around the world.

While the US was once the world’s leading creator of millionaires and ultra-rich, that mantle has passed to China, and specifically Hong Kong, where the number of ultra-rich surged by 19% and 31% respectively last year compared to ‘just’ 9% in the US.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As we have frequently discussed, years of monetary-policy-led economic expansion has fueled a decade of rapidly rising financial asset prices but tepid economic growth in most developed economies. That has greatly benefited the decreasing percentage of people that actually own financial assets and done very little for everyone else. While there are reasons to believe that accelerating GDP growth and tightening labor markets in the US may finally start to narrow the American wealth divide, growth rates outside the US are decelerating and one has to wonder how long US growth can remain robust amid an increasingly bearish global backdrop.

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