The Lemon Fool

I thought you may be interested in this map of Europe. Each country has the amount of it's wealth that is owned by the top 1% of the population written on it's area.

Before you look- have a guess which country tops the list and also have a quick think about which country is at the bottom

Spoiler scroll ... perhaps I'm over thinking a little but I thought if you wanted to ponder a guess about top and bottom of the table without seeing it I'd leave some space. If you're not bothered, or to darn lazy to scroll down, I apologise profusely

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AiY(D)

I hear all these moans about the 1%. I think we should be encouraging the 2%

Then we as individuals are unlikely to pay any taxes or less at least.

See when you see a map like that, Russian looks quite ominous doesn't it? Maybe its the black colouring

I guess this must have been produced by someone doing a PHD in Grievance Studies and no doubt excludes the market value of people's pensions (the capitalised value of civil servants DB pensions must be huge in most countries, and similarly the value of index linked state pensions is massive)

How do they count institutional ownership?

In the UK, that would be headed by the Crown and the Church. And then wealthy institutions like Trinity College, Cambridge. Only below those do we see individual owners - whether directly (e.g. homeowners) or indirectly (e.g. REIT shareholders).

In other countries, those structures at the top, and how you count them, might be different. Without being told the details, we can't judge.

UncleEbenezer wrote: Only below those do we see individual owners - whether directly (e.g. homeowners) or indirectly (e.g. REIT shareholders)..

You may not see individual shareholders even then because of the widespread use of nominees. ISAs and SIPPs in particular would be held this way.

An old left wing factoid used to be that 95% of the wealth was held by 5% of the population. Again without definitions as to how wealth was established and measured. It might be sounder to measure taxable income which should be available from tax records.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

This is a percentage of a percentage of an undefined "wealth value" which will be different in each country. I don't understand what that would possibly tell us.