Germany, rank 30 out of 30. Behind Greece. That is not a headline from a satire magazine. It is the new UBS Global Wealth Report 2026, and it puts median wealth per German adult at 53,485 US dollars. The Greek median stands at 59,162 dollars. Portugal at 76,978. Slovenia at 81,366.
Let that sink in for a moment. The land of export champions and engineers, the country that lectures the rest of Europe on fiscal discipline, sits dead last in the wealth table of the world's 30 richest markets.
Now the counter-question: Do you believe the typical German is poorer than the typical Greek? That the family in Stuttgart is worse off than the family in Thessaloniki?
Of course not. And that is exactly where the story begins that has kept half the internet busy this week.
The Tweet That Set Everything Spinning
Journalist and activist Ben Norton shared a chart by economist Gabriel Zucman on X and stamped his own era labels on it. The final era, from 2010 onward, he calls "Neofeudalism." The chart tracks the wealth of the richest 0.00001 percent of US households, which today means exactly 19 families, relative to American national income. The curve drifts along below four percent for decades, collapses to almost nothing after the New Deal, then explodes from the 1980s onward. Today it stands at nearly 14 percent. Higher than at the peak of the Gilded Age. Higher than in the days of Rockefeller and Carnegie.
Norton's punchline: America loves to boast about its wealth, but that wealth belongs to a handful of oligarchs. The proof? By average wealth, the US ranks second in the world at 696,277 dollars per adult, right behind Switzerland. By median wealth, it crashes to rank 28, at a meagre 68,998 dollars. Less than Slovenia. Half of Italy. And that, Norton concludes, is why the Atlantic's claim that Britain is now "as poor as Mississippi" is absurd neoliberal disinformation.
It is a rhetorically brilliant triple jump. And there is a sleight of hand at every single station.
What the Tweet Gets Right: The Oligarch Curve Is Real
Let us start fair. The Zucman data is serious, and it is breathtaking. In 2024 alone, the wealth of the 19 richest US households grew by one trillion dollars, from 1.6 to 2.6 trillion. Their share of total American household wealth jumped from 1.2 to 1.8 percent, the largest single-year increase ever recorded. The entry ticket to this club: at least 45 billion dollars per household. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffett, the Waltons, the Kochs.
The UBS finding is real too: inflation-adjusted median wealth in the US has fallen by roughly 20 percent since 2020, while average wealth kept climbing. The US now has the sixth-highest wealth inequality of all markets in the study. And at the very same time, the country minted over 441,000 new dollar millionaires in 2025, more than 1,200 per day, nearly half the global total.
Both at once. Record millionaire production at the top, a shrinking median in the middle. Anyone who calls that inequality is correct.
What the Tweet Gets Wrong: The Median Lies Too, Just Differently
Now back to Germany, rank 30, behind Greece. Because the tweet's own table demolishes its own thesis.
If median wealth were the honest yardstick for how the typical citizen lives, the typical German would be the poorest inhabitant of the developed world. Poorer than a Greek after fifteen years of debt crisis. That is obviously nonsense. So the metric must be measuring something other than prosperity.
It is. Median wealth is, in truth, a statistic about homeownership rates and pension design, dressed up as a poverty statistic.
First: In Greece, more than 70 percent of households own their home. In Germany, not even half do. A renter shows up on paper with no wealth, even if he earns well and lives well.
Second, and this is the decisive point: The most valuable asset of the average German never appears in any wealth statistic. His claim against the state pension system. Capitalized, that claim is easily worth several hundred thousand euros for an average earner, if it were a private portfolio. But it is not. It is a promise from the state: invisible to UBS, impossible to sell, impossible to bequeath, and, let us say it plainly, reducible by a single act of parliament at any time.
The same pattern explains the American number: Social Security does not count, and the 401(k) balances that half the country never builds cannot count either. And it explains Switzerland, which leads the world on averages and slides to rank 8 on the median: high rental rates, wealth collectivized in pension funds.
So the median punishes precisely those countries where the state has monopolized retirement savings. One could almost say: Germany's statistical poverty is the receipt for a system in which citizens never hold their largest asset in their own hands. Remember that thought. We will come back to it.
The Mississippi Trick: Switching Metrics Mid-Sentence
Norton's third jump is the most elegant piece of misdirection. The Atlantic essay "How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi", currently making the rounds everywhere, is about GDP per capita and about incomes. Norton refutes it with a wealth statistic. That is like criticizing a marathon runner's finishing time and offering his body weight as the rebuttal.
Because on income, the metric actually in dispute, the case is crystal clear: median disposable household income in the US runs roughly a third above Britain's, even adjusted for purchasing power. In 2007, British median income had just overtaken Germany's, the pound stood above two dollars, and London was on the verge of displacing New York as the world's financial capital. Today the pound buys 1.35 dollars, junior doctors are striking for the fifteenth time over starting salaries of 38,800 pounds, six million Britons sit on NHS waiting lists, and one in ten Brits has resorted to DIY dentistry because they can neither find a public dentist nor afford a private one.
And that British median wealth of 125,335 dollars that Norton triumphantly holds up against America's 68,998? It consists largely of absurdly expensive houses in a country that has refused to build for a generation. That is not evidence against Britain's malaise. That is a symptom of it.
The Truth Neither Side Will Tweet
Here is the heart of the conundrum, and it is uncomfortable for both camps:
Both things are true at the same time. By the income and consumption of its typical household, the US is by far the richest large country on earth. And at the very top of its wealth distribution, the US is more extremely concentrated than any other Western democracy, with 19 families whose fortunes equal 14 percent of a national income approaching 30 trillion dollars.
The left wants you to conclude from the second truth that the first one is a lie. The cheerleaders of the American model would prefer you never think about the second one at all. Both sides treat statistics not as instruments of measurement but as ammunition. Each reaches into the toolbox and pulls out exactly the metric that tells its story: average or median, income or wealth, nominal or purchasing-power adjusted, with pension claims or without. The number comes first, and the truth gets tailored to fit.
What This Means for You
If you hold wealth or are building it, this debate is no academic finger exercise. Draw three lessons from it.
First: Never trust a national statistic to tell you how you are doing. You do not live in the average and you do not live in the median. You live in your own balance sheet. The only wealth statistic that matters is your own, and you should run it the way UBS runs theirs: coldly, in hard numbers, across jurisdictions.
Second: Invisible wealth is vulnerable wealth. The German is statistically poor because his largest asset is a claim against a heavily indebted state, a claim he can neither sell, nor pledge, nor pass to his children, and whose terms the debtor may rewrite unilaterally. That is not a footnote to the statistic. That is the statistic. Whoever holds his wealth himself, in real assets, in businesses, in portfolios, shows up in every table. Whoever entrusts it to the state vanishes from the table. And eventually, we fear, not only from the table.
Third: The neofeudalism debate is the opening act of the next tax debate. When 19 families hold wealth equal to 14 percent of national income and those charts are shared millions of times, then wealth taxes, exit taxes, and levies on substance are not a possibility. They are a certainty, and the only question is where they land first. Zucman himself has spent years designing exactly these instruments, and governments from Berlin to London are listening very carefully. Anyone who still keeps his entire wealth, his company, his family, and his tax residence bundled in a single jurisdiction is betting that his state, of all states, will resist the temptation. It is the worst bet of our era.
Germany at rank 30, behind Greece: yes, the number is misleading. But it still tells a true story. The story of a country whose citizens work hard, earn well, and end their lives owning astonishingly little, because the system is built that way. More money. More freedom. Less state. It remains the only program that leads out of that table.
Andere reden. Wir setzen es um.