Wealth of the rich and super-rich dropped by $3 trillion last year

The number of high net worth individuals worldwide has fallen in the last 12 months. New research suggests that the number of people with a net worth of more than $1 million declined by more than 3%.

A recurring study from Capgemini has examined the wealth of millionaires around the world. Looking at people with net worth of at least $1 million in more than 70 countries, the firm considered the total assets of individuals – and found that the number of millionaires has decreased for the first time in five years.

In 2021, the world had 22.5 million private individuals with a private wealth of at least $1 million dollars, but in 2022 that number shrank by 700,000 to 21.7 million. The 3.3% dip is the deepest Capgemini has discovered, since it began documenting the fortunes of the world’s most wealthy individuals in 2008.

At the same time, the total wealth of the 21.7 million millionaires fell by 3.6% last year. In 2021 they owned a combined $86 trillion, but that sank to $83 trillion a year later. This seems to have been driven by trends in two of the world’s largest economic regions.

In both absolute and relative terms, the number of millionaires in North America declined by 6.9%, from 7.9 million in 2021 to 7.4 million in 2022. Their total wealth held fell by an even more rapid 7.4%, to $25.6 billion. Meanwhile, in Europe, the number of dollar millionaires decreased by 2.0% to 5.6 million in 2022, and total private wealth similarly fell at a steeper 3.2%, to $18.2 trillion over the same period.

According to Capgemini, this decline is likely related to developments on the stock market – which saw the development of a number of tech-bubbles in the last year. In 2022, for example, the shares of various tech companies from the US (such as PayPal, Meta and AirBnB) plummeted – with one estimate suggesting the global big tech market lost $4 trillion last year. At the same time, overhyped assets such as NFTs and metaverse property tanked dramatically, having been billed as the next big thing in investments earlier in the year.

That is not to say that other regions escaped the trend. In Asia-Pacific, the number of high net worth individuals and their total wealth declined. In 2021, there were 7.2 million dollar millionaires in this region, with a combined wealth of $25.3 trillion. The following year, it was $7.1 million millionaires with a total of $24.7 trillion in private property.

As attention-grabbing as the combined tumble in the number of millionaires might be, though, it is unlikely many of the remaining super-rich will be losing much sleep over it. After all, Capgemini also determined how wealth is distributed around the world as part of the research, and showed that not only did nearly 90% of high net worth individuals have between $1 million and $5 million, but that group – consisting of more than 19.5 million people – still owns 43.3% of all the world’s private wealth.

At the same time, some developing markets did see high net worth individuals rake in even more wealth. In Africa, the number of high net worth individuals increased by 4.3% and their total wealth by 1.6%, while Latin America increased those figures by 4.7% and 2.1% respectively. At the same time, the economic transformations across economies in the Middle East prompted a 2.8% expansion of millionaires, and 1.5% growth in their assets.