2025 was an extraordinary year for wealth. The world's private wealth grew by 10.8 percent, the fastest pace since 2017, and considerably faster than the economic output it supposedly comes from. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa the increase reached 17.5 percent. Almost a million people became dollar millionaires, more than 2,600 on every single day. The United States and China together now hold more than half of the world's wealth.
That is one half of the picture. The other: the richest ten percent of humanity hold roughly three quarters of all assets, the poorer half holds two percent. At the very top, among the richest 0.001 percent, some 56,000 people, sits three times as much wealth as among the four billion people of the lower half combined. Their share has risen from 3.7 to 6.1 percent since 1995.
Both findings are familiar. They are quoted every January and discussed the same way every year. The third finding is rarely quoted, and it matters most.
Since the mid-1990s, global wealth has risen from a little over four to more than six times world income. Almost the entire increase sits in private balance sheets. Private wealth climbed from around 350 to more than 500 percent of world income. Public wealth stagnated at 80 to 90 percent and turned negative in North America and Oceania, where governments owe more than they own. East Asia is the only region where the public still holds anything worth mentioning.
The world has grown richer and has stopped owning anything together. When people discuss distribution, they discuss the gap between individuals. The gap almost nobody discusses runs between private balance sheets and the balance sheet of the public, and it is widening faster.
Where Redistribution Reaches Its Limit
Redistribution acts on income. It takes hold where money moves, at the wage, the profit, the purchase. But the divergence of the past thirty years does not happen in incomes, it happens in holdings. A wage is taxed at source. A gain in value is taxed only when it is realised, and whoever does not need to sell, does not sell. He borrows. Loans against securities are tax-free liquidity. That is why the effective tax rate on billionaire wealth sits at around 0.3 percent. This is not a loophole. It is how tax law is built.
The second limit is consent. The French Senate rejected a minimum levy on large fortunes by 188 votes to 129. Switzerland threw out an inheritance initiative aimed at very large estates with 78 percent against, more decisively than any poll had predicted. These instruments do not fail on their mechanics. They fail on majorities, even where those affected are a vanishing minority.
The third limit is coordination. The United Nations framework convention on international tax cooperation has moved from principles into treaty text and is meant to reach the General Assembly in its 82nd session. At the same time, the largest wealth jurisdiction in the world has left the process. What is agreed without it does not apply to it.
None of this makes redistribution wrong. It corrects an outcome after that outcome exists, and it has to be won again in every parliamentary term. The question that follows here is a different one: to whom does the outcome fall in the first place, before anything needs correcting.
The Missing Holder
A holder is someone who holds something for others without owning it. A trustee. The distinction sounds academic and is not.
Norway has one. At the end of June 2026 its government fund held around 2.34 trillion dollars, spread across more than 7,000 companies in over 50 countries, on average 1.5 percent of every listed share on the planet. No Norwegian can withdraw a single krone. Arithmetically each inhabitant accounts for some 385,000 dollars, but this is not a bank balance, it is a claim on a common asset. Three parts make the construction work: an institution that manages, a rule for how much may be withdrawn each year, and a beneficiary who has not been born. The fund recently disclosed a stake in SpaceX for the first time. A public trustee thus holds a share in the infrastructure of the next century, on behalf of people who are not yet alive.
Germany, France and the United States lack this construction. There is private wealth on one side and public debt on the other, and between them almost nothing that anyone holds for those to come. Germany is currently laying one building block that points in this direction, and I will return to it. It does not replace the holder, because the beneficiary there is an individual child rather than the public across time. This is the empty column in the world's balance sheet. It is not a moral failing, it is an architectural one.
The fund alone is not the answer either. Nauru had a trust built on phosphate revenues that could have carried the country indefinitely, and lost it. What separates Norway from Nauru is not the money, it is the rule above the money.
Six Routes into Ownership
The first route: a stake instead of a subsidy. When a state hands billions to companies, it can take shares rather than a press release. The United States is doing this on a large scale right now: roughly 26.7 billion dollars across some 30 holdings. The best known is Intel, where 8.9 billion dollars turned into a stake worth around 42 billion. The defence department is the largest shareholder of a rare earth producer with 15 percent. The same money would have been paid out in Europe as a subsidy and would have left no stake behind. The limits are obvious: the holdings are recorded inconsistently, the most complete public overview is maintained by a private think tank rather than the government, and only 19 percent of American voters consider state share ownership right. Without a register, a statutory basis and a rule for what happens to the returns, this becomes patronage with equities.
The second route: returns as a budget line. Singapore finances around 20 percent of all government spending from the returns on its reserves, an estimated 28.5 billion Singapore dollars for 2026. Without that contribution the budget would be in deficit. The country has no oil. It invested surpluses rather than spending them, over decades, and today pays for a fifth of the commonwealth out of common property instead of out of earned income. The limit: this construction is built slowly, and dependence on capital markets grows with its success.
The third route: the fund and the rule above it. What transfers from Norway is not the commodity but the blueprint: a cap on annual withdrawals, management outside the budget cycle, and disclosure down to the individual position. The real question for a country without oil is what feeds such a fund. There are candidates: spectrum auctions, concessions, land value levies, equity in exchange for publicly funded research, and before long orbital slots.
The fourth route: a capital stock for everyone. Since 1992 Australia has required employers to pay a fixed share of wages into individual accounts locked until retirement, raised in steps from three to twelve percent today. By March 2026 those accounts held 4.4 trillion Australian dollars across 25 million of them. Every employee is thereby an owner of productive capital and not merely the recipient of a wage. This is the most effective known route to broadening capital ownership. Its limits are equally clear: about half the money is invested abroad, 30 percent of workers over 30 do not believe they can stop at 67, and interrupted careers accumulate less. A capital stock broadens ownership. It does not equalise it.
Two very recent cases belong to this fourth route and show how differently it can be built. Germany has recently attempted a small version of the same idea. On 12 August 2026 the federal cabinet adopted the bill for the Frühstartrente, an early-start pension. The federal government will pay ten euros a month into a funded retirement account for every child from the age of six to eighteen, retroactive to 1 January 2026, initially for the 2020 birth cohort alone and then one further cohort each year. Where parents open no private account, the Bundesbank invests the money. It becomes available at 65 at the earliest. The law is meant to take effect on 1 January 2027.
The direction is right, the order of magnitude is not. Across the full twelve years of eligibility the state contribution adds up to 1,440 euros per child. In Norway around 385,000 dollars are attributable to each inhabitant, in Australia the average account holds a six-figure sum. Germany is introducing the principle without funding it. That is worth more than it looks, because an existing principle can be raised and a non-existent one cannot.
Notably, Germany is not alone. In the United States, Trump Accounts went live on 4 July 2026. For every child holding American citizenship and born between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2028, the Treasury pays a one-time 1,000 dollars into an account invested in broad index funds. Families may add up to 5,000 dollars a year, employers up to 2,500 of that, and a private foundation adds 250 dollars each for millions of children in designated postal areas. Within five weeks, two governments of opposing political programmes introduced the same instrument. That says something about how sound the idea is.
Comparing the two constructions teaches more than any debate of principle. The American version puts the money at the beginning, where compounding has the most time, and releases it at eighteen. The German version spreads it across twelve years and locks it until sixty-five. Both are confined to narrow cohorts and both are symbolic in what the state contributes. And both carry the same built-in flaw: their real weight comes from voluntary top-ups by parents, grandparents and employers. Those who can afford to add, add. An instrument meant to broaden ownership thus reproduces, at its decisive point, exactly the distribution it set out to correct. Australia avoids this flaw, because there the contribution is not voluntary but attached to the wage.
A holder in the Norwegian sense emerges in neither case. The beneficiary is a single child rather than the public across time, and both programmes cut by birth year. Anyone born in Germany before 2020 and in the United States before 2025 remains outside for now.
The fifth route: capturing value the owner did not create. A plot of land becomes more valuable because a rail line is built. A frequency becomes valuable because the state grants it exclusively. An orbit becomes valuable because no one else may enter it. In all three cases the owner did not produce the increase in value, the public did. Economically this is the least contested revenue there is, and the least used.
The sixth route: employee ownership. Shares instead of a bonus. It moves ownership to where the work happens and requires no redistribution at all. Those who share in the return negotiate differently, stay longer, and back decisions that reach beyond the current year. It is therefore the only one of the six routes that broadens ownership and alters the distribution of power inside the firm at the same time. Its limit: it reaches only those in employment, and in Germany the tax allowances for it have sat for years below the level at which they would make a difference.
Five Brakes on Concentration
Ownership broadens. It does not limit. That requires its own instruments, and they take hold at different points.
The most important is inheritance. Concentration rarely arises within a single generation, it is passed on. Anyone who wants to limit it has to regulate the point of transfer rather than annual income. Politically this is the hardest point of all, as the Swiss result shows.
The second is the realisation principle. As long as wealth exists for tax purposes only upon sale, and borrowing against assets functions as tax-free liquidity, raising rates achieves close to nothing.
The third is minimum taxation with visibility. A two percent levy on fortunes above 100 million would raise more than 200 billion dollars a year worldwide. Registers come first, because you can only tax what is recorded, and to date not a single country publishes complete distributional data on income and wealth. The corporate side follows the same logic: taxing profits where economic activity actually takes place would, by modelled estimates, raise around 500 billion dollars annually without a single rate going up.
The fourth is competition law. Wealth concentration follows market concentration. Antitrust is distribution policy without a tax, and it almost never appears in the inequality debate.
The fifth is starting capital. At the lower end the problem is not the tax rate. The problem is that there was never anything there that could have grown. A basic endowment paid to everyone at eighteen out of a public fund works precisely there and nowhere else.
The Contradiction No One Resolves
These two toolboxes work against each other, and that is rarely said out loud.
A state fund holding 1.5 percent of every listed company does not reduce concentration. It gives the public a share in it. Australia's capital stock depends on share prices rising. Whoever gives a society a share in the gains makes it a co-owner of the very dynamic he wants to slow. Norway's pensioners are invested, through their fund, in the companies whose concentration of power is criticised in Norway.
This is not an objection to ownership. It is the clarification that three distinct policies are at work here and are routinely confused. Redistribution corrects an outcome. Ownership changes to whom the outcome falls. Limitation caps the top. A society needs all three and should argue for them separately.
For the poorer part of the world one precondition comes first and disables every one of these policies while it holds. Each year around one percent of global economic output flows from poorer to richer countries, through persistently higher yields on one side and lower interest payments on the other, roughly three times the total of development aid. Since 2022 developing countries have repaid creditors more than they receive in new lending, at interest rates two to four times American levels and six to twelve times German ones. Ownership presupposes a surplus. A country spending most of its revenue on debt service cannot build a fund. For the poorer half of the world, the first instrument of ownership is therefore not a fund but the price of money.
What Follows
The wealth of the coming decades is being created in a few fields: data centres and the energy that feeds them, grids, critical minerals, orbits. Public money flows into all of them in substantial volume, and in all of them it is being decided right now whether that money disappears as a subsidy or remains as a stake. In Europe it mostly disappears. In the United States it increasingly remains as equity, though without a register and without a rule about who the returns will eventually belong to.
This is where the distribution of the coming wealth is settled, not in some future tax reform but in contracts signed this year. Anyone who intends to redistribute once the wealth exists arrives two decades late and with the weaker tool.
What share of the value that will be created over the next twenty years does your country, your municipality, your organisation hold today, and who decided to forgo it?
Website: https://planet-futures.org