The other day my friend Nevenka (this is her real name but you do not need the rest of it, the address, the e-mail and mobile number - believe me - but the pic above you may enjoy, it was taken in a Scheweningen restaurant), a very capable business-woman who made a fortune in the lon-job segment of the textile industry, told me, almost concerned for her future that "One million dollars is not any more what it once was". Since I am positive that Nevenka will shelter and protect her assets much better without my advice or publicly expressed worries - I decided not to burden her with some great ideas of mine about her money. The problem (of the shrinking $1 million) never the less remained. So I decided to reflect on its global aspect. There must be a hell of a lot of anxiety among the 7,242,382 dollar-millionaires worriedly going up-and-down the planet. Theodora the verplegster (who publicly offers this sort of services could do them (and me) a favour by alerting them to this piece. It is a superfluous info for you that prof. ph-d Borislav Blagoev (who I am glad to hear is very alert and intellectually active at 95) introduced me to Statistics and induced me to the secret how to perfuse my essays with ciphers without making the text boring. Professor Blagoev played those trick on me for a year only, when I (still) wanted to become an economist. Years latter (I was already in Linguistics and English literature) somebody from LSE told me a diploma in economy from any eastern country would be junk in the UK. Anyway, I loved the subject. -If handy, you can prove anything you want with statistics. And you can pivot around the same figures re-interpreting them again and again,-said the professor behind his heavily rimmed glasses. He was right. WHERE THE BIG MONEY RESIDES Thus, these 7,242,382 individuals have households and those (spouses, children, parents, relatives, in-laws) probably count some 60 million souls. That is about 1% (one percent) of the total world population. (The clock said there were 6,545,925,356 of us at the time of the writing, but I prefer a more conservative cipher.) Now, watch this closely: according a survey published by the BCG they (those original, individual 7,2 millionaires) own, posses put together about $25,000 billion worth of the financial assets of the big wide and wild world. For the ease of understanding (!) $25,000 billion is $25 trillion. (It is quite another story that this "putting together" does not come easy, if at all, but this is statistics, remember?) Percentage-wise the 1% of the households own 29% of the world total assets - not counting their residences, jewelry, paintings, yachts and the like. It is obvious that the distribution of millionaires around the globe is very uneven. China with 1,3 billion people has only 250,000 millionaires while India with 1,08 billion has only 10,000 millionaires. These two countries with about 2,4 billion 35%-40% of the world population have less millionaires than Philadelphia and Detroit put together. I have always known it: the big money resides in the States. Once I was in Atherton, California, their richest township. More millionaires than one can dream and the State Department had arranged that I enjoy a hospitality of one - I thought that these people were playing games on me. I think they do not care about money, they are kind of above the finances. And that is how they make a mess out of them. WHAT DOES THIS TELL YOU First of all that it is useless to worry about the shrinking value of one million dollars. Let those who have that sort of money worry about it themselves. Will Joop van der Ende worry about my shrinking AOW of €211 so that I reciprocate and try help him when he does not even dream of moving his ass for me? All he does is make more money with his idiotic serials. Or help the late Vlissingen who I admired for his attitude, charm, looks and money. He would have laughed at the price of my concoction against liver cancer and in consequence would have either died (same for him) or would have gotten it from me for free and I would have remained poor (same for me). In other words - nothing actually changes in this big money-game.. On the other side, there are some 220,000,000 million people with about $335,000 of assets each. (This is the generalized view, the statistical outlook, keep that in mind p-lease.) These people have about $75 trillion in assets. With the other $25 trillion - it is altogether plus-minus $100 trillion. That is it, That is the the financial pot of the planet (no castles, villas, jets, jewelry and the like.) All that cash, all these assets are in the hands of only 207,242,382 individuals. I'll be damned if I worry about them. My daughter is coming for a snack, we shall open an Australian, quite decent, Merlot (that is the third bottle I got on the formula 3=2 from AH) and we shall play with Gabi, my grand-daughter before the girls (my wife included) go out for some action.

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