The stock of shares and investment certificates held by households grew at the fastest pace.Continue reading
Global household financial wealth grew by 7.6 percent in 2023, offsetting losses from the previous year, according to the newly released Allianz Global Wealth Report. The study looked at the wealth and debt position of households in nearly 60 countries, writes Világgazdaság.
Growth has been rather uneven across the three main asset classes: securities (11 percent) and insurance/pension savings (6.2 percent) have benefited from the stock market boom and higher interest rates, growing at a much faster pace than the average over the past decade.
By contrast, the annual growth rate of bank deposits fell to 4.6 percent, one of the lowest rates in 20 years, after years of boom following the COVID pandemic. Moreover, growth has been relatively steady across all regions, with Asia and North America both growing at above 8 percent.
The United States (8.6 percent) outpaced even China (8.2 percent), resulting in another significant decline in the emerging economies’ growth advantage over the advanced economies, which fell by just 2 percentage points last year, reflecting the fact that in six of the last seven years
emerging economies have lost a lot of their growth advantage.
Until 2017, when the trade dispute between the US and China deepened, the gap was at least 10 percentage points or more in favor of developing countries. The emerging economies seem to be the ones that will pay the biggest price for the retrenchment of globalization.
Net financial assets grew at a remarkable rate of 17.3 percent last year, with net financial wealth per capita of EUR 22,860, moving Hungary up 2 places to 28th in the global ranking of household financial wealth.
New savings increased significantly by 74 percent to EUR 16.5 billion. However, these additional financial assets all moved into securities, rising by more than 100 percent to EUR 14.9 billion. Within this asset class, Hungarian savers favored bonds – and to a lesser extent investment funds – but avoided equities.
In contrast, households withdrew EUR 1 billion from bank deposits. Insurance/pension savings increased by EUR 0.7 billion, a similar level to previous years.
The head of Allianz Hungária‘s financial division, Ágnes Tölgyes, pointed out that the picture is less rosy in real terms: adjusted for inflation, the value of household financial assets fell by 1.9 percent in 2023, but the purchasing power of financial assets at the end of last year was still 10.1 percent higher than at the end of 2019, before the pandemic.
Via Világgazdaság; Featured image via Pexels