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Economy

The World’s Millionaires Are Disappearing

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The number of millionaire households in the world dropped from 11 million in 2007 to 9 million last year, a fall of almost 18%, according to The Boston Consulting Group. The figure was worse in North America where the drop was 22%.

The world’s wealthy are getting poorer and poorer at an alarming rate.

The study’s other important top-line statistic is that “Global wealth fell from $104.7 trillion in 2007, measured in assets under management, to $92.4 trillion in 2008—a decline of 11.7 percent. It was the first decline since 2001.”

The rich seem to have joined the middle class on the metaphorical bread line, which is not good news for developed economies that are counting on consumer spending to help drive GDP growth rebounds. The wealthy may buy different goods and services than the middle class do, but their share of overall purchasing  power is tremendous. What has been described as a “jobless” recovery is becoming a “wealthless” recovery as well.

The erosion of personal wealth matches the erosion of wealthy pools of capital. Harvard and Yale announced that their endowments dropped by more than 25% during their fiscal years which ended June 30. These institutions are clearly no better at managing their money than people in the top tier of the economic scale are.

The economic suffering, if it can be called that, has reached the rich. BMW and Tiffany (TIF) beware.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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