“The Western world in particular experienced a major slump in financial assets in 2022” A quarter of working people worldwide want to change jobs

The management consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG) presented a new study on Tuesday. It shows: For the first time in more than a decade, global financial assets have fallen.

A similar study by Capgemini came to the same conclusion earlier this month. These results are here:

Who lost how much money?

Overall, financial assets contracted 3.5 percent to $255 trillion. Financial assets are money in the form of cash, account balances, debt securities, stock and mutual funds, and pensions.

Investors from Europe and North America were particularly hard hit:

Specifically, financial assets have shrunk by more than $10 trillion in North America and $1.4 trillion in Western Europe. Assets under management also fell slightly in Australia. In contrast, financial assets increased slightly in Asia, as did the Middle East.

However: in the same period, the so-called tangible assets – for example real estate, precious metals or other physical assets – have increased in value. It is a development that is not unusual when there is turmoil in the financial markets: many invest in gold, for example, which is considered stable in uncertain times. Overall, real assets rose more than five percent last year to $261 trillion.

For this reason, total net wealth worldwide rose slightly despite declining financial assets: by 0.3 percent to USD 459 trillion.

What are the reasons?

The rich and super-rich felt the consequences of the enormous malaise on the financial markets last year. In 2022, the markets fell sharply due to, among other things, the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and the change in monetary policy – or the global rise in interest rates: the American stock index Dow Jones lost nine percent last year, the Japanese Nikkei about eleven percent, Euro Stoxx, the leading European stock index also lost eleven percent and the Swiss SMI even lost more than 16 percent.

The result: The club of the super-rich, with assets of more than $100 million, lost some 4,000 members last year and now has nearly 62,000 worldwide. Most of the super-rich live in the US (22,000) and China (nearly 7,600).

What’s it like in Switzerland?

In Switzerland, net worth rose 2.5 percent to nearly $5.4 trillion. Financial assets totaled $3.4 trillion and physical assets totaled $3 trillion. This was offset by liabilities of nearly $1.1 trillion.

The Swiss would invest 40 percent of their financial assets in pension funds and life insurance. In an international comparison, Switzerland ranks 14th in the list of net assets, ahead of the US (with $144 trillion), China ($76 trillion) and Japan ($24 trillion). Germany ($19.2 trillion) is fourth. France ($16.3 trillion) follows in fifth place, followed by Britain in sixth place ($16.2 trillion).

The growth of the Swiss financial center slowed

According to the study, there was a 0.9 percent increase in assets in Switzerland’s Swiss financial center last year over the previous year – by 2021 this will have grown by 5.5 percent. This is due to the wealth of the inhabitants, which shrank by 2.2 percent due to the stock market crash. Meanwhile, assets in cross-border business rose 4.1 percent.

While net worth has increased slightly, the number of super-rich in this country has also declined: in 2022, there will still be 740 people who have the equivalent of more than $100 million. That is three percent less than last year. They own 21 percent of the country’s financial assets. In addition, there are more than 580,000 people in Switzerland with financial assets worth more than a million dollars.

(paint, with material from awp/sda)