The latest version of the UBS Global Wealth Report for 2025 can be downloaded here. It's full of fasciniating insights. Slightly oddly, they don't give a number for the total amount of indivdiual wealth like they did last year ($471 trillion). The overall pyramid of wealth can be seen in this figure.
If you add up the numbers of people in each slice, you reach 3.808 billion which suggests that not everyone on the planet is included in the analysis. The total of net wealth comes to $470.51 trillion, which is strangely the number they provided in last years' report.
As everyone knows, much of the wealth is in the hands of just few people - 15 with net wealth of more than $100 billion, 16 between $50 and $100 billion, and 2860 other billions with between 1 and 50 billion.
Although the total figure seems the same as the previous year, you can see from this graph of the annual year on year changes that there was a 4.6% increase - suggesting that the actual total should be around $492 trillion.
Taxing all that at 1% a year would, at a stroke, provide the $5 trillion needed to tackle climate change. While there have been a few blips (financial crash, covid), the report states that "Overall, total wealth net of debt and net of inflation, has risen at a compound annual growth rate of 3.4% since 2000". And they "expect this dynamic to continue throughout the second half of the decade." This suggests that the figures could be as follows, depending on whether we use the average increase since 2000 (3.4%) or the increase in just the last year (4.6%):
That's an increas of over $105-146 trillion by the end of the decade. Would it be so terrible if less than a third of that increase was siphoned off to save our planet? Since the wealthy are increasing their wealth anyway by 4.6% a year, they will still be a lot richer at the end.
And, of course, the increase in personal net wealth is heavilly concentrated among the ultra rich, as the report shows very clearly.
The report talks about the 52 million EMILLIs - or Everyday Millionaires - who have net wealth of 1 to 5 million dollars.But there is another graph showing the change in both average and median wealth for a range of countries. There are some dramatic differences.
The average wealth figure essentially tells you whether the average person has increased their wealth. But when the median wealth increass much more than the average, it means that it is the richest half of the population that is getting most of the benefit.
One of the most telling charts is the average and median wealth for the top 25 countries. The average figures can be used directly to determine how much would be raised by a 1% annual tax in each country. You just multiply by the number of adults.
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