Glaring disparity

Trust a Swiss banker! Credit Suisse has undertaken an analysis of wealth in the world....and the distribution of it. The disparities are extreme, as AlterNet highlights in this piece on the banker's Report:

"The Credit Suisse figures show that total global net worth, despite the 2008 global economic meltdown, has rocketed up 72 percent since 2000.

The world’s 4.4 billion adults, notes the new Credit Suisse research, now hold $194.5 trillion in wealth. That’s enough, if shared evenly across the globe, to guarantee every adult in the world a $43,800 net worth.

But the world’s wealth, of course, does not stand evenly divided, and the new Credit Suisse study, to its credit, neatly breaks down the arithmetic of our staggering global unevenness.

We now have, at the wealth spectrum’s uppermost reaches, just over 1,000 billionaires and another 80,000 “ultra high net worth individuals” worth over $50 million each. We can add into this wealthy summit still another 24 million adults worth between $1 million and $50 million.

At other end of the global spectrum sit three billion people -- “more than two thirds of the global adult population” – with an average wealth per adult less than $10,000. About 1.1 billion of these adults hold net worths less than $1,000."

For those interested, over at Reuters there is a special report relating to the USA - "The Haves, the Have-Nots and the Dreamless Dead"

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