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credit suisse
The US Leads the World in Millionaires, but the Wealth Is Not Trickling Down
The spectacular wealth of America’s wealthy is paying no great dividends for average Americans; those dividends are funneling instead to the top of the U.S. economic ladder.
Aug 21, 2023
Five-star hotels. So yesterday. Today’s super rich, The Wall Street Journalreports, are picking palatial luxury villas over swanky suites when they need a quick pick-me-up.
Italy, France, and Greece currently offer the widest array of villa options, but Portugal seems to be catching up fast. So many options!
How can our deepest pockets find the right one? A “high-end travel consultant,” the Robb Report on luxury living points out, can identify just the perfect villa vacation. The cost for joining the circle that can access one top consultant’s advice: $25,000 in annual fees on top of a $150,000 joining fee.
The world’s distribution of wealth remains remarkably top-heavy. Individuals with less than $10,000 to their name—52.5% of the world’s adult population—hold just 1.2% of the world’s assets.
The cost of actually renting a high-end villa? The realtor agency Oliver’s Travels was offering at one point this summer three dozen villas renting for over $130,000 a week.
How many people on our Earth today can afford to put down—without batting an eye—that sort of cash? Some of our best annual stats on our global super rich have been coming out, over recent years, from the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse. But this fabled 167-year-old institution stumbled royally during the pandemic and, earlier this year, ended up the property of its Swiss rival UBS.
UBS, fortunately, has opted to continue Credit Suisse’s annual Global Wealth Report tradition, and the 2023 edition—covering data through 2022—has just appeared. As usual, this annual report’s release has enjoyed substantial media coverage worldwide, especially in the business press.
Most all the latest coverage has generally emphasized the news in the 2023 report’s opening lines. As one typical headline, from Bloomberg, reads: “Global Wealth Fell Last Year for First Time Since 2008.”
Wealth per global adult, the new Global Wealth Report does indeed show, fell by 3.6% in 2022. But most of that decline, the report goes on to add, “came from the appreciation of the U.S. dollar against many other currencies.” Hold those exchange rates constant and the story changes. Wealth per adult increases by 2.2%.
This year’s Global Wealth Report actually has a much more important story to tell than the global wealth per adult, and the global media coverage has by and large missed it. That story: The world’s distribution of wealth remains remarkably top-heavy. Individuals with less than $10,000 to their name—52.5% of the world’s adult population—hold just 1.2% of the world’s assets.
Those numbers almost exactly reverse at the other end of the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s “global wealth pyramid.” The 1.1% of the global adult population worth over $1 million individually holds 45.8% of the world’s wealth.
One nation—the United States—is driving this incredibly top-heavy statistical picture. Some 38% of the world’s millionaires call the USA home. China, the next largest contributor to the global millionaire population, claims just 11%. Japan and France, the next two highest millionaire manufacturers, each claim only 5% of our globe’s at least seven-digit set.
Worldwide, about a quarter-million individuals—243,060, to be exact—qualify for Credit Suisse’s more exclusive “ultra-high-net-worth” status. These ultras each hold at least $50 million in personal wealth, and over half of them, 51%, hail from the United States. That U.S. ultra-rich share nearly quadruples China’s ultra-rich population, the world’s second largest.
America’s richest of the rich, in short, dominate the ranks of our global deep-pockets. But the rest of us Americans, cheerleaders for our rich love to assure us, have no cause for unease about that domination. The more wealth that America’s wealthy accumulate, their reasoning goes, the more our rich can invest in creating better futures for ordinary working Americans.
The latest Credit Suisse numbers totally undercut that claim. In other developed nations—societies with the rich holding significantly smaller shares of their national wealth than in the United States—typical people have seen substantially greater growth rates in their personal wealth.
Back in the year 2000, the typical American had a net worth of $46,479. The typical net worth of French adults that year: $51,360. By the end of 2022, the typical French adult held $145,591 in personal wealth. The typical—median—U.S. adult wealth last year: just $107.739. Over that same two-decade-plus span, the typical Dutch median net worth jumped from $44,513 to $120,270, the typical Canadian from $37,295 to $143,862.
The spectacular wealth of America’s wealthy, in other words, is paying no great dividends for average Americans. Those dividends are funneling instead to the top of the U.S. economic ladder.
Just one final illustrative example of that dynamic from the new 2023 Global Wealth Report: Japan’s top 1 percenters hold 18.8% of their nation’s wealth. The U.S. top 1% wealth share? Almost twice as much: 34.2%.
Japan’s most typical adults, meanwhile, hold personal net worths of $124,258, some 15% higher than the $107,739 U.S. wealth median.
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Credit Suisse Complicit in 'Massive' Conspiracy to Help Rich Americans Dodge Taxes: Senate Report
"Republican budget cuts have decimated the IRS's ability to root out this kind of offshore tax evasion scheme," said Sen. Ron Wyden.
Mar 29, 2023
The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday published the results of a two-year investigation showing that the scandal-plagued Swiss bank Credit Suisse has been complicit in a "massive, ongoing conspiracy" to help wealthy U.S. citizens dodge taxes.
Spearheaded by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chair of the Senate panel, the probe found that Credit Suisse violated the terms of a 2014 plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that required the bank to crack down on tax dodging by its U.S. clients.
As part of the 2014 deal, according to the Justice Department, Credit Suisse admitted to "knowingly and willfully" helping U.S. clients hide offshore assets and income from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
The Senate Finance Committee report states that it obtained "voluminous records detailing the role Credit Suisse employees played in assisting U.S. businessman Dan Horsky in concealing over $220 million in offshore accounts from the IRS."
"The committee's investigation also uncovered almost two dozen additional large, potentially undeclared accounts held by Credit Suisse belonging to ultra-high net worth U.S. persons," the report continued. "In 2022, Credit Suisse disclosed to the committee that in connection with its ongoing cooperation with DOJ, it had identified 10 additional large client relationships involving U.S. persons, with each client holding accounts in excess of $20 million."
Wyden said in a statement Wednesday that "at the center of this investigation are greedy Swiss bankers and catnapping government regulators, and the result appears to be a massive, ongoing conspiracy to help ultrawealthy U.S. citizens to evade taxes and rip off their fellow Americans."
"Credit Suisse got a discount on the penalty it faced in 2014 for enabling tax evasion because bank executives swore up and down they'd get out of the business of defrauding the United States," the Oregon senator continued. "This investigation shows Credit Suisse did not make good on that promise."
"Republican budget cuts have decimated the IRS's ability to root out this kind of offshore tax evasion scheme, but Democrats are committed to stepping up enforcement against wealthy tax cheats."
The report was published days after the Switzerland-based investment banking giant UBS agreed to purchase Credit Suisse for more than $3 billion as the latter firm faced growing questions about its financial health amid fears of a broader banking crisis.
Wyden said Wednesday that Credit Suisse's "pending acquisition does not wipe the slate clean," urging the U.S. Justice Department to follow through on its pledge to "crack down on corporate offenders, particularly repeat offenders like Credit Suisse."
"In addition to a significant penalty for the bank, the individual bankers involved in these schemes must also face criminal investigation," Wyden added. "It simply makes no sense to allow the bankers who have their hands on these hidden accounts and enable tax evasion to get away scot-free. Finally, the cases detailed in this investigation are textbook examples of why Democrats gave the IRS new funding for enforcement. Republican budget cuts have decimated the IRS's ability to root out this kind of offshore tax evasion scheme, but Democrats are committed to stepping up enforcement against wealthy tax cheats."
In total, the Senate Finance Committee said it found evidence that Credit Suisse helped potentially more than two dozen American families hide upwards of $700 million at the bank after the 2014 plea agreement with the Justice Department.
Citing two former Credit Suisse employees, CNBCreported Wednesday that "although the bank did disclose and close many American accounts after its 2014 plea agreement, some bankers worked with high net worth clients to keep certain Americans at the bank, by changing the nationalities listed on their accounts and ignoring evidence that the account holders were Americans."
"In other cases, they helped American clients move money to other banks, without reporting those transfers to U.S. authorities," the outlet added.
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Bailing Out the Undeserving Rich—Again
Wealth creates power; power creates more wealth. Unattended, this can become a vicious cycle.
Mar 20, 2023
Last week’s bailout of small banks (and it was a bank bailout) needs to be seen in the larger context of America’s soaring inequality.
The standard conservative explanation for why inequality has widened is that individuals are paid what they’re “worth” — and that a few Americans at the top are now worth extraordinary sums while most Americans are not.
Their argument is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid in the market. Yet the amounts people are paid are morally justifiable only if the legal and political institutions defining the market are morally justifiable, which they are not.
Markets depend on who has the power to design and enforce them — deciding what can be owned and sold and under what terms, who can join together to gain additional market power, what happens if someone cannot pay up, how to pay for what is held in common, and who gets bailed out.
These are fundamentally moral judgments. Different societies at different times have decided these questions differently. It was once thought acceptable to own and trade human beings, to take the land of indigenous people by force, to put debtors in prison, and to exercise vast monopoly power.
So we need to ask: Is it morally acceptable that the typical worker’s wage has stagnated for the last 40 years while most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top? Do we believe that people who are rich are succeeding because of their own inherent worthiness or because the game is rigged in their favor? Have people who are poor failed, or has the system failed them? Is it morally acceptable that the pay of American CEOs has gone from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker 40 years ago to over 300 times today? Are the denizens of Wall Street — who in the 1950s and 1960s earned modest sums but are now paid tens or hundreds of millions annually — really “worth” that much more now than they were worth then?
Inequality in America began widening in the late 1970s and then took off. Inequality hasn’t widened nearly as much in other advanced economies. Why not?
Corporate and financial executives in America have done everything possible to prevent the wages of most American workers from rising in tandem with productivity, in order that more of the gains go instead into corporate profits and stock prices. Their major strategy has been to make workers less secure so they accept lower real wages (adjusted for inflation).
Some of this insecurity has been the result of trade agreementsthat have encouraged companies to outsource jobs abroad — protecting the firms’ intellectual property and financial assets but not the labor value of the people who work for them.
Some insecurity has resulted from shredded safety nets. Public policies that emerged during the New Deal and World War II placed most economic risks on large corporations through wage contracts and employer-provided health benefits along with Social Security, workers’ compensation, and 40-hour workweeks with time-and-a-half for overtime.
Now, those safety nets are mostly gone. Full-time workers who had put in decades with a company can find themselves without a job overnight — with no severance pay, no help finding another job, and no health insurance. Today, nearly one out of every five working Americans is in a part-time job. Two-thirds live paycheck to paycheck. Employment benefits have shriveled: The portion of workers with any pension connected to their job has fallen from just over half in 1979 to under 35 percent.
Some insecurity has resulted from the government’s policy of fighting inflation by raising interest rates to slow the economy — putting most of the inflation-fighting burden on average workers who thereby lose their jobs or don’t get real wage gains, rather than on corporations through tough antitrust enforcement, laws against price gouging, and price controls.
Most basically, the prevailing insecurity is due to the demise of labor unions. Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars. America’s largest employer is now Walmart, and the typical entry-level Walmart worker earns about $9 an hour. The GM worker was not better educated or motivated than the Walmart worker.
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The people who now hold a record share of the nation’s wealth justify their wealth (and their low tax rates) by utilizing three myths.
The first is trickle-down economics. They claim that their wealth trickles down to everyone else as they invest it and create jobs. Yet for over 40 years, as wealth at the top has soared, almost nothing has trickled down. (Trump provided a giant tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, promising it would generate $4,000 in increased income for everyone else. Did you receive it?)
The super-wealthy do not create jobs or increase wages. Jobs are created when average working people earn enough money to buy all the goods and services they produce, forcing companies to hire more people and pay them higher wages.
The second myth is the “free market.” As I noted above, the ultra-rich claim they’re being rewarded by the impersonal market for creating and doing what people are willing to pay them for. The wages of other Americans have stagnated, they say, because most Americans are worth less in the market now that new technologies and globalization have made their jobs redundant.
Rubbish. There’s no reason why the “free market” would reward vast multiples of what the rich were rewarded decades ago. Besides, the market can induce great feats of invention and entrepreneurialism with lures of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars — not billions.
The ultra-wealthy have rigged the so-called “free market” in America for their own benefit. Billionaires’ campaign contributions have soared from a relatively modest $31 million in the 2010 elections to $1.2 billion in the most recent presidential cycle — a nearly 40-fold increase. What have they got for their money? Tax cuts, freedom to bash unions and monopolize markets, and government bailouts. Their pockets have been further lined by privatization and deregulation.
The third myth is that they’re superior human beings — rugged individuals who “did it on their own” and therefore deserve their billions.
Baloney. Sixty percent of America’s billionaires are heirs to fortunes passed on to them by wealthy ancestors. Others had the advantages that come with wealthy parents.
Don’t fall for these myths. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. The so-called “free market” has been distorted by huge campaign contributions from the ultra-rich. The ultra-rich were lucky and had connections.
There is no moral justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. It is distorting our politics, rigging our markets, and granting unprecedented power to a handful of people.
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The last time America faced any comparable degree of inequality was at the start of the 20th century. In 1910, President Theodore Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy American democracy.
Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922. Since that time, both have eroded. As the rich have accumulated greater wealth, they have also amassed more political power — and have used that political power to reduce their taxes.
Years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the 1929 crash not only as a financial crisis but as an occasion to renegotiate the relationship between capitalism and democracy. Accepting renomination in 1936, he spoke of the need to redeem American democracy from the despotism of concentrated economic power.
“Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities,” he said, an “industrial dictatorship” now “reached out for control over Government itself … [T]he political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor — other people’s lives … Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it.”
FDR gave workers the power to organize into labor unions, the 40-hour workweek (with time-and-a-half for overtime), Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation for injuries. He raised taxes on the top. And he regulated finance — making banking boring.
Since then, these reforms have also eroded.
The two Roosevelts understood something about the American economy and the ultra-rich that has now reemerged, even more extreme and more dangerous. Wealth creates power; power creates more wealth. Unattended, this can become a vicious cycle.
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