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Le Million Dollar Club: France has second highest number of new millionaires in the world

The Local France
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Le Million Dollar Club: France has second highest number of new millionaires in the world
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Almost 260,000 French citizens have joined the Million Dollar Club in 2018, second only to the US in terms of millionaire growth, a new study has found.

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More people have become millionaires (in terms of US dollars) in France in 2018 than anywhere else in Europe, a growth in the number of wealthy citizens that’s second only to the United States globally. 

That’s according to Crédit Suisse's annual Global Wealth Report, which measures the wealth index of countries and its citizens across the planet.

In euros, a million dollar equates to €871,315 dollars according to October 23 2018 exchange rates.

Approximately 259,000 French people, roughly the population of the southern city of Bordeaux, joined the so-called Million Dollar Club, taking the total number in France up to 2.14 million US dollar millionaires.

As of January 1st 2018, France’s national stats body INSEE estimated that l’Héxagone’s population stood at 67.2 million, meaning that ‘Le Million Dollar Club’ represents 3.18 percent of people in metropolitan France.

With regard to the other nations at the top of Crédit Suisse's index, the US (in first place) saw a huge spike in the number of wealthy citizens - 878,000 new millionaires.

Germany took third place on the podium with 253,000 new millionaires, then the United Kingdom with 240,000), Italy with 200,000 and in sixth place China 186,000 new millionaires in 2018.

These margins are of course subject to currency fluctuations, meaning that a stronger euro against the US dollar will result in more French people being classified as millionaires.

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This however hasn’t been the case in 2018.

"The main explanation for these increases in the number of millionaires in European countries is down to the growth of actual wealth, rather than in exchange rate fluctuations," the authors of the Credit Suisse study conclude.

In global standards, Credit Suisse estimates that the number of millionaires now stands at 42 million people, an increase of 2.3 million compared to last year’s figures.

With the current world population estimated to be around 7.6 billion, that means that the number of global (US dollar) millionaires now represents around 0.55 percent, a smaller figure even than the so-called ‘one percent’, a term popularised by a 2006 documentary focusing on the growing wealth gap between the wealthy elite compared to the overall citizenry in the US.


 

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