Australia's Quiet Collapse

Every year up until its collapse, Credit Suisse would prepare a report that looked at how wealthy the people of countries around the world were.
Instead of just looking at GDP per capita which calculates how much the average person in an economy produces in market output every year, this report attempted to calculate the net worth of those people to see how good they were at accumulating wealth over time.
Someone with a high income that is spending everything they make on rent and overpriced food isn’t going to grow their wealth as quickly as someone who has a more modest income, but is paying off their own home and is investing diligently into retirement accounts.
I like to call this the San Fran Tech Bro Conjecture.
But according to these annual reports the Australian people always looked like that second group of slower more deliberate wealth builders.
Their raw income isn’t as high as here in America, but they were consistently some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
UBS, which absorbed Credit Suisse following its collapse, recently released the 2024 report and once again Australians had the second highest MEDIAN net worth on the planet.
They only fell behind Luxembourg which is a European Micronation which you are probably not in the tax bracket to even be aware of.
The fact that this report tracks the MEDIAN instead of the average net worth is also really important.
This means that the Australian right in the middle of a line up from richest to poorest is more than TWICE as rich as an American in the same position…