Bit late to this but it’s a busy day. Some good news. We’re rich. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2012:
In US dollar terms, Australia experienced very rapid growth between 2000 and 2011, with a short interruption in 2008. The average annual growth rate was 13%, but half of the increase was due to an exchange rate appreciation. Since 2007, wealth has merely grown at 1.2% per annum, based on constant exchange rates. Still, its wealth per adult in 2012, at USD 355,000, was the second highest in the world – after Switzerland and ahead of Norway. More surprisingly perhaps, its median wealth of USD 194,000 is the highest in the world.
A noticeable feature is the composition of wealth, which is heavily skewed towards real assets, which amount on average to USD 288,000 and form 64% of total household assets. In fact, the level of real assets per adult in Australia is now the second highest in the world after Norway. In part, this reflects a sparsely populated country with a large endowment of land and natural resources, but it is also affected by high urban real estate prices.
Compared to the rest of the world, very few Australians have a net worth that is less than USD 10,000. This reflects factors such as relatively low credit card and student loan debt. The proportion of those with wealth above USD 100,000 is the highest of any country – eight times the world average. With 1,571,000 people in the top 1% of global wealth holders, Australia accounts for 3.4% of this wealthy group, despite having just 0.4% of the world’s adult population.
Definitely some stuff in there to be proud of. For instance, being as rich as this:
Without any huge disparities:
But also some problems, much more so than reported by the MSM. The main one is this:
We’re going nowhere since the GFC. When the currency falls, we will tumble down the list. The other point to note is that the report does not refer to imbalances in the underlying economy. Just as The Kouk ignores this fact and can somehow claim that we have a perfect economy on the same day that he calls for a 50bps rate cut. We may be more rich than Switzerland and Norway but we’re more at risk as well. Both of them run large current account surpluses, we run a large current account deficit, approaching 6% in coming months. That makes you vulnerable to a sudden reversal in your wealth.
Still, a stellar result for this year!
