International- The US has the highest number of individuals with worth more than $50 million, according to a new global wealth report.
- The US is also home to the majority of people with more than $100 million in wealth.
Back in 1821, the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley made a prescient observation.
"The rich get richer," Shelley wrote. He noticed those who already had wealth continued to accrue more at the expense of those poorer than them.
Exactly two centuries later, Shelley's words still largely ring true. The rich are still getting richer, according to a new report on global wealth from investment bank Credit Suisse.
Credit Suisse's report found that over the past two years, the number of "ultra high net worth individuals" — those with more than $50 million in assets — in the world has grown by 50%.
The report noted that the ultra high net worth class only makes up about 4% of the world's population of millionaires, but more than half of them live in the US.
The US also saw an additional 30,000 people swell the ranks of its ultra wealthy in 2021.
America now harbors more multimillionaires than any other country in the world by a long shot. China, which ranks second for the number of ultra high net worth individuals, only claims 12% of the world's share.
Part of the reason the rich are continuing to grow their coffers is due to rising stock prices.
The report noted that since the 2008 recession, "stock prices have risen more than house prices in the United States, raising the shares of top wealth groups."
And as the poet laureate warned, they're growing at the expense of less endowed classes.
In 2000, the country's richest 1% controlled 32% of its total wealth. As of 2021, the top 1% controls more than 35% of the country's wealth, the report noted.
The gap between the country's upper echelons and its middle classes is drastic.
The median amount of wealth in the US — the figure which divides the country's top half from its bottom half — falls right around $93,000.
Using a common measure of wealth inequality, the Gini coefficient, the Credit Suisse data shows that the US has an overall more uneven wealth distribution than other countries with large ultra-high net worth populations.
Gabriel Zucman, an economist who studies inequality at University of California-Berkeley, believes that results confirm that the ultra wealthy have experienced tremendous gains over the past few years.
Zucman told Insider via email that, "they suggest that the time has come to modernize our tax systems and adapt them to this new reality."