Essay Preview: LifeReport this essayMay 15-22, 2006 issue – Once upon a time, being rich meant being rooted. A wealthy family would build a grand home in the city, have a second one for weekends in the country, then stock them with expensive art, fabrics, jewels and, of course, a staff. They would belong to the best local clubs, frequent restaurants, and support the local symphony and museum. If they were trying to signal something, it was that they had been in this place for centuries. Fast-forward to 2006. The rich are on the move. They still live well, of course, but they do so in many places, across the globe. They go from their house in Hong Kong to the pied-Д -terre in New York. They spend a month in Provence one year and then catch the London theater scene on the way back. (By some estimates, 15 percent of the properties in Western Europe are now second homes.)If the old rich were symbolized by stability, the new are marked by movement. Welcome to the jet setЖa quaint, old-fashioned phrase but one that best describes this new world.
Partly this is a simple matter of more money and more ways to invest and spend it. According to the 2005 World Wealth Report produced by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, there are now 8.3 million millionaires internationally, up 7.3 percent from the previous year, holding an eye-popping $30.8 trillion worth of assets. Whats more, the top end of that spectrumЖthose worth more than $30 millionЖis growing fastest. The group includes numerous well-known Western business titans, but numbers are rising faster in parts of the developing world. The last few years of soaring equity, real estate and commodity markets have been good to them all: UBSs wealth-management division alone saw an influx of $76 billion in new money last year, up 57 percent from 2004.
In India, the wealth of people with enough money to invest in the current financial year is up from 20.6 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2013 and an alarming 19.6 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year. But despite an ongoing wave of wealth-gathering, there is much need for a broader approach for emerging markets to invest in their economies. In China, for instance, there seems to have been a great deal of investment on a large scale for the last 12 years, particularly after the “new era of high efficiency” from the Chinese government and its investment banks.
With investment still a large part of China’s total investment, the number of people making in excess of $1 million per year, much of it from China and India, is rising with time. The Chinese government and financial institutions are already providing high-quality loans, while large banks are starting to offer more. In India, there is growing interest in such banks, and the number of high-end private lending institutions is increasing, particularly in some areas, including banks, private investment banks and other enterprises (BIIO). However, there are still plenty of non-Chinese ones in India, which are just a few miles from China’s border, or at least between Mumbai, Sichuan province and Guangzhou. While there are many areas that are growing in India, especially in the rural West but also among the upper middle classes, as well as the poor who move across the border and move to urban areas, China is just getting better at controlling wealth. As the China Daily reports: “Since 2001 China has become the dominant player in the world economy. In 2000 it created the world’s second-largest economy. It has more than doubled its gross domestic product (GDP) between 2008 and 2014, and at the beginning of this year it will surpass France to become the world’s second-largest economy for a second year in a row—a significant victory for the country’s economy and for global development.” (The Times of India’s article, “What Did A Few Billion Make in 2011?” features a picture of the number of people now living in the nation’s highest-earning households, from 3:45 a.m. to 6 P.M., whose average house in the country stands at $3,080. In his recent biography of Indian investment banker M.P. Lakshman, I have written about many such poor Indian investments made by the late finance minister. A lot of these investments are made primarily by the Chinese and in India mainly by foreign banks and government lending institutions. Most of the high-level Chinese government and financial institutions in India are at the top of the list.)
The latest “booms” (such as the one in Singapore) are mainly made during China’s high-tech boom. The real GDP number, published last month, for 2011 was 1.2 trillion renminbi ($3
In India, the wealth of people with enough money to invest in the current financial year is up from 20.6 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2013 and an alarming 19.6 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year. But despite an ongoing wave of wealth-gathering, there is much need for a broader approach for emerging markets to invest in their economies. In China, for instance, there seems to have been a great deal of investment on a large scale for the last 12 years, particularly after the “new era of high efficiency” from the Chinese government and its investment banks.
With investment still a large part of China’s total investment, the number of people making in excess of $1 million per year, much of it from China and India, is rising with time. The Chinese government and financial institutions are already providing high-quality loans, while large banks are starting to offer more. In India, there is growing interest in such banks, and the number of high-end private lending institutions is increasing, particularly in some areas, including banks, private investment banks and other enterprises (BIIO). However, there are still plenty of non-Chinese ones in India, which are just a few miles from China’s border, or at least between Mumbai, Sichuan province and Guangzhou. While there are many areas that are growing in India, especially in the rural West but also among the upper middle classes, as well as the poor who move across the border and move to urban areas, China is just getting better at controlling wealth. As the China Daily reports: “Since 2001 China has become the dominant player in the world economy. In 2000 it created the world’s second-largest economy. It has more than doubled its gross domestic product (GDP) between 2008 and 2014, and at the beginning of this year it will surpass France to become the world’s second-largest economy for a second year in a row—a significant victory for the country’s economy and for global development.” (The Times of India’s article, “What Did A Few Billion Make in 2011?” features a picture of the number of people now living in the nation’s highest-earning households, from 3:45 a.m. to 6 P.M., whose average house in the country stands at $3,080. In his recent biography of Indian investment banker M.P. Lakshman, I have written about many such poor Indian investments made by the late finance minister. A lot of these investments are made primarily by the Chinese and in India mainly by foreign banks and government lending institutions. Most of the high-level Chinese government and financial institutions in India are at the top of the list.)
The latest “booms” (such as the one in Singapore) are mainly made during China’s high-tech boom. The real GDP number, published last month, for 2011 was 1.2 trillion renminbi ($3
In India, the wealth of people with enough money to invest in the current financial year is up from 20.6 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2013 and an alarming 19.6 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year. But despite an ongoing wave of wealth-gathering, there is much need for a broader approach for emerging markets to invest in their economies. In China, for instance, there seems to have been a great deal of investment on a large scale for the last 12 years, particularly after the “new era of high efficiency” from the Chinese government and its investment banks.
With investment still a large part of China’s total investment, the number of people making in excess of $1 million per year, much of it from China and India, is rising with time. The Chinese government and financial institutions are already providing high-quality loans, while large banks are starting to offer more. In India, there is growing interest in such banks, and the number of high-end private lending institutions is increasing, particularly in some areas, including banks, private investment banks and other enterprises (BIIO). However, there are still plenty of non-Chinese ones in India, which are just a few miles from China’s border, or at least between Mumbai, Sichuan province and Guangzhou. While there are many areas that are growing in India, especially in the rural West but also among the upper middle classes, as well as the poor who move across the border and move to urban areas, China is just getting better at controlling wealth. As the China Daily reports: “Since 2001 China has become the dominant player in the world economy. In 2000 it created the world’s second-largest economy. It has more than doubled its gross domestic product (GDP) between 2008 and 2014, and at the beginning of this year it will surpass France to become the world’s second-largest economy for a second year in a row—a significant victory for the country’s economy and for global development.” (The Times of India’s article, “What Did A Few Billion Make in 2011?” features a picture of the number of people now living in the nation’s highest-earning households, from 3:45 a.m. to 6 P.M., whose average house in the country stands at $3,080. In his recent biography of Indian investment banker M.P. Lakshman, I have written about many such poor Indian investments made by the late finance minister. A lot of these investments are made primarily by the Chinese and in India mainly by foreign banks and government lending institutions. Most of the high-level Chinese government and financial institutions in India are at the top of the list.)
The latest “booms” (such as the one in Singapore) are mainly made during China’s high-tech boom. The real GDP number, published last month, for 2011 was 1.2 trillion renminbi ($3
Ten or 15 years ago, wealth management was a pretty straightforward business. The private-client division of institutions like UBS, JPMorgan or Citibank would invest in a set of simple optionsЖstocks, bonds and real estate. But consider how UBS, the worlds largest private banker, has evolved over the past decade. Its clients, increasingly entrepreneurs and self-made financiers with a web of multinational investments and homes in several countries, want 24/7 global access to every imaginable asset via bespoke trading platforms (highly encrypted for privacy, of course). That means that aside from buying and selling equities and debt for their clients, UBS now also has to be a software and IT