Credit Suisse 2022 Global Wealth Report Takeaways

When building wealth, the generation you belong to and even the country you live in really does affect you, and no more so than over the past few years. Credit Suisse has been publishing an in-depth Global Wealth Report yearly since 2010, and their findings for 2022 were fascinating.

Of note was the impact government relief programs had on the various generations of their citizens. Check out the percentage change in wealth for millennials during 2021, who in the US experienced a 45% increase in wealth that year!

Image credit: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2022

The Credit Suisse report utilizes median wealth, which looks at the average net worth of a group of people and then picks out the number right in the middle of that range. Median wealth provides a more realistic snapshot of how a group is doing financially overall.

Some of the millennials' gains during the post-pandemic era may be explained by the fact that they currently make up 37% of American home buyers, and home prices in the US skyrocketed during 2020 and 2021. Also consider that 31% of millennials started investing before age 21, and the financial markets performed exceptionally well after the initial 2020 pandemic shock.

These general patterns of increasing wealth sadly didn't hold true for the developing world, however. Some of the wealth change patterns in the US, Canada and the UK (not shown in the chart above) were thanks to government relief programs during the pandemic, which many other countries simply could not afford to provide:

"However most low-income countries and many middle-income countries could not afford generous pandemic relief payments. The generational impacts could well have differed there if their economies sustained substantial damage due to the direct or indirect effects of the pandemic...[t]his means that younger people who were most vulnerable to job loss would likely have drawn down their savings, incurred more debt and experienced declining wealth."

The pandemic had far-reaching economic effects that we're still feeling today as we watch what global inflation is doing to the wealth created over the past few years by government relief programs and the post-pandemic housing and stock market rallies.

With central banks taking measures to curb inflation, who knows where these wealth patterns will be by this time next year!