World Wealth

The number of millionaire households in the world has bounced back to boom-time levels, according the 2010 Global Wealth Report. There were 11.2 million millionaire households in the world at the end of 2009.
That puts the millionaire count about where it was before the global financial crisis. (a “millionaire household” is a household with $1 million or more in assets under management. Those assets don’t include real-estate, private businesses or luxury goods. It does include cash deposits, money-market funds, listed securities held directly or indirectly through management investments, and onshore and offshore assets.)

The study said 83% of the world’s households own only 13% of the wealth, down from 14% the previous year. The top 0.5% of households (those with $5 million or more) owned 21%, or $23 trillion, of the world’s wealth. That is up from 19% in 2008.

In the U.S. the number of millionaire households was 4.7 million. That means that roughly 4% of American households are millionaire households and they control a greater percentage of the wealth (55.2% in 2009 versus 55.1% in 2007 .)

While the ranks of millionaires were growing, the US unemployment rate went from 7.7% at the beginning of 2009 to 10% at the year's end.“It’s been a recession where everyone took a hit -- with the bottom taking a bigger hit. And then the wealthy alone have bounced back,” said Timothy Smeeding, who studies income inequality at the University of Wisconsin.
“Assets have recovered much faster than we expected, to be candid,” said Monish Kumar, a managing director in Boston Consulting Group's New York office.“This is not a big surprise; it’s obviously the richer households who are seeing the biggest increase in wealth.”
The rise in inequality during 2009 continues a trend that has been going on over the last few decades, one that was briefly interrupted in 2008 during the recession.
In the UK , inequality show little change on the previous year, and are "almost unchanged" from the average over the past 10 years.Office for National Statistics said that the recession had made no difference to the levels of inequality in society. The slump saw bankers' bonus payments collapse, but also many more people fall into unemployment. .

Bruce Holley, senior partner at the BCG who did the research said “Someone with a billion looks at their numbers and complains like they’re someone with $100,000…they say ‘I have big mortgages to pay, I may have to liquidate some assets, I can’t make certain investments.' We all have our own version of pain.”

Oh , how SOYMB feels for them !! - Not