The question is of course: how are these fortunes divided? This can be seen in this graph. All private wealth is listed here – real estate, monetary funds, capital equipment of companies.
Monetary assets make about one third, 32%, and more than a half consists of real estate. The majority of people don’t possess real estate. All real estate is owned by about one fourth of the population. The total sum of wealth is quite considerable and amounts to 9’920 billion German Marks in 1993 or expressed in Euros 4’960 Billion. A survey is carried out every five years and the allocation of wealth shows interesting results.
There are different groups of households with the labels A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The first two groups A and B stand for about half of the population but they own only less than 10% of the total wealth. The major part of wealth concentrates on the two last groups with a share of about 50%. Half of the wealth is in the hands of 10% of the population and the other half in the hands of 90% of the population. If one considers that the top of the graph ends at 5 Millions, the wealth column of a billionaire would be 200 times as high as the highest column in this graph. Of course, billion columns are very thin, but by their very height they are
quite relevant.