Numbers

Have you ever wonder just how wealthy you are compared to the rest of the people in the world? Today we switch over and talk purely about numbers. Let’s begin by taking a number like the number 100. I chose this number for more reasons than it simply being a nice round even number to work with. It is the largest denomination of currency in the United States in circulation. Moreover, let’s take 100 people. Make that 100 wealthiest people in the world. In the year 2012 alone, they made over $240 billion. To put this amount into perspective, if we were to take these guys and build a hypothetical country. Their 2012 earnings will be ranked in the top 20% of world GDP. Of course that $240 billion is not proportional with some of those individuals making a substantially larger amount than others and 16 actually making a net loss. To simplify it though, if it were proportional each individual will be taking home a nice $2.4 billion in one year alone.

The numbers do not end here. What I merely described above was just one year. How about their entire net worth? Sum it all up and those 100 people will have a net worth of $1.9 trillion. The United State, the richest nation in the world has a GDP of about $14 trillion. More than ten percent lies in the hands of 100 people. Now the number one trillion is used often these days regarding the deficit of the United States. But how much is one trillion dollars?

To answer this question we go back to our nice round even number at the beginning – the good old $100 bill. At financial banks, a stack of $100 bills band together makes $10,000 which is a little less than ½ an inch thick. Take 100 of those stacks and you have $1 million. These stacks can easily fit in your backpack. Take a regulate construction pallet that’s about four feet long by three feet wide and start filling it up with these stacks of $10,000. When you reach about half the height of an adult, you will have $100 million. 

Ten of those pallets will be $1 billion. It would take 10,000 pallets in order to make $1 trillion. That is about enough to fill the size of a NFL football field four times over!

With the overuse of the number 1 trillion in the news, we lose sight of how much that really is. It’s an astronomical amount of wealth. The net worth of just 100 people is actually close to $2 trillion. The burgeoning wealth in emerging market has created so many opportunities for innovations as well as social welfare. As we look at the numbers alone, it is not surprising that the luxury market has experienced so much growth in the past years. With a new class of consumers with an explosive growth in their net worth and a taste for high end products and experiences, the luxury market parallels this growth and continues to deliver.