McKinsey: Global households got $40 trillion richer in 2025 as the paper wealth economy swelled to $1.8 quadrillion

Global households added a record $40 trillion in wealth in 2025, pushing total household net worth to $570 trillion—a 7.3% jump that outpaced the 5.9% average growth rate seen since 2000—as the world’s overall balance sheet of assets swelled to nearly $1.8 quadrillion, according to the McKinsey Global Institute’s newly released “Global Balance Sheet 2026: Imbalance and Divergence” report. These are both record levels, it’s almost needless to say. This is more than quadruple the value from 2000, at nominal values and market exchange rates, and a faster growth rate than GDP, “posing questions about its health and stability,” McKinsey drily noted, and it’s not uniform across countries. Household wealth per capita is growing in most countries, but largely not keeping pace with GDP, which the i