Change in Inflation-Adjusted Incomes Since 1999

For your viewing pleasure on this wet weekend, I offer this informative graphic from Barry Ritholtz's weekend reading list showing the significant rise in incomes at all levels since 1999, and the particularly sharp rise in all levels since 2014.  This has been true whether we're talking the top 5% or the bottom 20, and everything in between.  I also offer an intriguing article about where the majority of the world's billionaires come from.  It may be a good reason to open an account at UBS.  The link to the 16-page article is attached below the opening paragraph.  Enjoy what will likely be the last balmy weekend of this year.

How UBS Became Home to Half the World’s Billionaires

By Elisa Martinuzzi and Joel Weber | October 3, 2017

Photographs by Kalpesh Lathigra

The CEO of UBS, Sergio Ermotti, is a trader at heart. Yet the most recent chapter of his career begins with the investment banker overhauling an investment bank. It’s 2011, and he’s just been named interim chief executive officer of a Swiss bank that’s no longer quite so secretive, that’s still reeling from the financial crisis, and that’s been tarnished by a rogue trader’s $2.3 billion loss.

Ermotti quickly embarked on a Matterhorn-size strategic shift that downplayed the company’s investment banking and asset management efforts to focus on building the world’s largest wealth manager. The resulting stability and credibility has made UBS Group AG such a model that investors now value the bank at a premium to its European rivals, several of which have attempted to deploy versions of Ermotti’s playbook. Asked if there’s a limit to how big UBS can grow from an assets perspective, Ermotti says, “If I look at the size of some of our asset-management competitors, it doesn’t look like it.” In two recent interviews, Ermotti discussed his strategic vision, the role technology will play in shrinking the bank over the next decade, and a regulatory landscape so inhospitable that it’s like “they’re living on a different planet”—which could someday even mean the Swiss bank reconsiders its Swissness.  

Sergio Ermotti Q&A: How UBS Became Home to Half the World's Billionaires