explanade
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Here, then, is a real answer, courtesy of the hush-hush world of private banking: $25 million.
Twenty-five million dollars in investable wealth. The kind of money you could afford to see dip into the red for a quarter or three, maybe even a year or two, without breaking a sweat. With $25 million, maybe, just maybe, you're starting to be rich.
Because in this era of hyper-wealth and hyper-inequality, that is simply where rich begins—a ticket, in truth, to the first, lowly rung of rich. For most of the planet, $25 million represents unfathomable wealth. For elite private bankers, it buys their basic service.
Call it economy-class rich. Business class? That's $100 million. First class? $200 million. Private-jet rich? Try $1 billion.
We all know the wealth gap between the rich and poor, and the rich and the really rich, is only getting wider, due in large part to the bull market in stocks and wealth generated in private businesses around the world.
What may be less apparent, at least outside financial circles, is what all that money is worth to the bankers who discreetly tend those fortunes.
No private bankers worth their wingtips will say they don’t care about clients with “only” a few million. Northern Trust Corp., which works with many of the world’s richest families, stresses that in recent quarters more than 50 percent of new clients have had investable assets in excess of $10 million. But “to get the highest level, companies have raised the bar,” said Brent Beardsley, who leads Boston Consulting Group’s work in asset and wealth management globally.
The measure of what makes someone rich has changed dramatically in the past two decades. In 1994, when Peter Charrington, global head of Citi Private Bank, first joined the firm, “Three million was largely considered ultra-high net worth across the industry,” he recalled. “Fast-forward almost 25 years, and $25 million is how we define ultra-high net worth.”