IslamicFinance.de

Last week Credit Suisse released its annual Global Wealth Report. Their analysis shows that the top 1% of people now own 50% of the world’s wealth. However, the report had another finding that was even more astonishing and largely overlooked. What they found was that, as a percentage of the world’s population, there are now more poor people in the United States and Europe than there are in China. 10% and 20% of the world’s poorest are in North America and Europe. Here, they define poor as lacking ‘wealth’, i.e. taking into account assets and liabilities like cash and debt. Credit Suisse estimates that half of the world has a net worth less than $3,210. And a large chunk of Americans and Europeans can’t make that cut because their net worth is negative.