If you’re looking for people with significant negative net worth, in a way it’s surprising that only 7.5% of the world’s bottom 10% are in the US.Īnd as you start adding all those people up - the people who dominate the bottom 10% of the wealth rankings - their negative wealth only grows in magnitude: you get further and further away from zero. The poorest people in the world, using the Credit Suisse methodology, aren’t in India or Pakistan or Bangladesh: they’re people like Jérôme Kerviel, who has a negative net worth of something in the region of $6 billion.Īmerica, of course, is the spiritual home of the overindebted - people underwater on their mortgages, recent graduates with massive student loans, renters carrying five-figure car loans and credit-card obligations, uninsured people who just got out of hospital, you name it. And if you add up the net worth of the world’s bottom decile, it comes to minus a trillion dollars. How is it that the US can have 7.5% of the bottom decile, when it has only 0.21% of the second decile and 0.16% of the third? The answer: we’re talking about net worth, here: assets minus debts. Pakistan has 2.6% of the world’s bottom 10%, while Nigeria has 3.9%.īut there’s one unlikely country which has a whopping 7.5% of the poorest of the poor - second only to India. India is on the list, though: if you’re looking for the poorest 10% of the world’s population, you’ll find 16.4% of them in India, and another 4.4% in Bangladesh. If you look at the tables in the Credit Suisse datebook, China has zero people in the bottom 10% of the world population: everybody in China is in the top 90% of global wealth, and the vast majority of Chinese are in the top half of global wealth. The weird thing is that triangle in the top left hand corner. For instance, notice anything odd about this chart? And if you multiply $241 trillion by 0.7%, you get $1.7 trillion.Īll of which makes a certain amount of sense, until you start looking a bit closer. Add up the bottom five deciles, and you get 0.7% (not 0.71%, which is the number in the Oxfam report I have no idea where that extra basis point came from). The top 10% have 86% of the wealth the next 10% have 7.8%, and so on. Then, you flick forwards to page 146, where you find the proportion of all global wealth held by each of the world’s income deciles. First of all, you have to find the total wealth in the world, which you can find at the bottom of the fourth column on page 89: it’s $241 trillion. The answer is that it comes from a pair of tables in Credit Suisse’s 2013 Global Wealth Databook. The harder question is: where does the $1.7 trillion number come from? The 85 (or 67) number is easy: you just start at the top of the Forbes billionaires list, and start counting up the combined wealth until you reach $1.7 trillion. Oxfam does a pretty bad job of footnoting its report, but I did manage to finally track down how it arrived at this conclusion.

Pocket cash ledger