More billionaires walk the earth than ever before, their ranks surging 40% in five years, new research shows.
The world's 2,100 billionaires saw their fortunes swell 34.5% from 2013 to 2018, to $8.5 trillion, according to UBS' 2019 Billionaire Insights report released Friday. But 2018 was actually a losing year for most of them, thanks to global trade friction and stock market volatility. They lost a combined $388 billion.
Tech billionaires bucked that trend, growing their wealth by 3.4%, or $1.3 trillion, in 2018, according to the report. They've nearly doubled their ranks the past five years, from 76 to 148 in 2018.
"If tech billionaires' wealth were a country, it would rank second only to the U.S.," the report said. "Looking back over five years, tech billionaires have driven almost a third of the growth in billionaire wealth. U.S. tech billionaires accounted for more than half of that growth." UBS is one of the world's largest wealth managers with close to 1,000 billionaire clients.
But the burgeoning roster of the super-rich feeds into a wider debate about income inequality, which has become a signature issue for presidential hopefuls Sens. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent. Sanders has gone so far as to say billionaires shouldn't even exist.
The number of female billionaires has skyrocketed the past five years, climbing 46% to 233. Their collective wealth grew to $871 billion, led by progress in Asia, according to the report.
"While Asia continues to be seen as having more traditionally male-dominated cultures, it is heartening to see that the number of female billionaires has grown to more than double over the last five years," Julia Leong, a UBS partner and private banking lead, noted in the report.
Asia has seen some of the greatest advances in wealth and is now home to more than a third of the world's billionaires, their fortunes totaling $2.5 trillion. China recently surpassed the United States for the first time in claiming the largest share of the world's richest people. An October report from Credit Suisse said 100 million Chinese citizens are listed among the top 10% of all earners. The United States has 99 million people on that ranking, though it still has more millionaires, with about 40% of the world's total, according to the report.
But China's ultra-wealthy have been hammered by the nation's cooling economic growth, market fluctuations and weakening yuan; their net worth declined by 12.3% in 2018. The decline bumped dozens from the billionaires list and contributed significantly to the global drop-off in billionaire fortunes.
Business on 11/09/2019