Golden Horn and Bosphorus at sunset, Istanbul, Turkey
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Turkey came out miles ahead of the rest of the world in an annual global wealth ranking — in a result that may come as surprising, given the country’s high levels of inflation.
“Türkiye stands out with a staggering growth of over 157% in wealth per adult between 2022 and 2023, leaving all other nations far behind,” Swiss bank UBS wrote in its Global Wealth Report 2024, using the local spelling for the country’s name.
The next-highest countries in terms of average wealth growth per adult were Russia and Qatar with nearly 20% and South Africa with just over 16%. In the U.S., average wealth per adult grew by nearly 2.5%.
Inflation in Turkey sits at nearly 72%, an eye-watering figure for the country’s 85 million people, many of whom have seen a dramatic drop in their purchasing power over the last several years. In the last five years, the Turkish lira has lost nearly 83% of its value against the dollar, and the currency trades at 33 lira to the greenback as of 09:07 a.m. London time on Wednesday.
But for Turks who own assets like homes, wealth has grown, as inflation pushes up the costs of those holdings.
The UBS report defines net worth or “wealth” as “the value of financial assets plus real assets (principally housing) owned by households, minus their debts.” In a call with journalists, some of the report’s authors broke down the relationship between inflation and wealth rises in Turkey.
“In certain ways, the high pace of inflation also helps explain why wealth has risen much much more in local currency terms, at least [more] than in other countries because it’s worth keeping in mind that wealth is measured in nominal terms,” Samuel Adams economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, told CNBC.
“If inflation is very high, what tends to happen is that if you have a real asset like housing, the house prices tend to rise in line with inflation, if not even faster,” he said. “So those people with have homeownership, or who have equities, which also tend to perform fairly well in those environments, they tend to see their wealth accumulate a bit faster.
“Of course, it doesn’t mean that everybody benefits to the same extent,” Adams added. “If you’re not in those assets, if your wage rises don’t keep pace with inflation, then, of course, it will be fairly negatively affected.”
The report also noted the “currency effect”, which is what changes wealth growth the most — local currency growth figures for wealth are often significantly different from those in dollar terms.
“Türkiye’s already exceptional growth of over 63% in USD … more than doubles to nearly 158% in Turkish lira,” it said. Other examples in the report included Japan, which in dollar terms has seen less than 2% average growth in wealth per adult in U.S. dollar terms between 2022-23, but in local currency that growth was 9%.
Cityscape at sunset on March 4, 2024 in Istanbul, Turkey.
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Evaluating countries’ average wealth growth between the years of 2008 and 2023, “the most dramatic evolution has taken place in Türkiye,” UBS wrote, “where average wealth per adult in this period has shot up by 1708% in local currency.”
UBS Global Wealth Management’s Chief Economist Paul Donovan pointed out that being asset-rich does not necessarily mean being cash-rich — in Turkey, this could actually be the opposite.
“In terms of living standards rather than wealth, it’s also important to remember that if you own a house, the value of your house has gone up, but your real wage may be negative at the same time. So you can be … asset rich and cash poor,” Donovan said last week.
“That’s certainly a possibility, where a lot of the stresses that have arisen in the Turkish economy over the last few years have come about because of negative real income,” he added, “not necessarily what’s happening on the asset side.”
Austan Goolsbee, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, speaks to the Economic Club of New York in New York City, U.S., April 10, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Business owners and CEOs are already stocking up on inventory, and some American shoppers are panic buying big-ticket items in anticipation of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The sudden buying binge could cause an “artificially high” level of economic activity, said Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee.
“That kind of preemptive purchasing is probably even more pronounced on the business side,” Goolsbee told CBS’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday, adding: “We heard a lot about preemptive building-up of inventories that could last 60 days, 90 days, if there [was] going to be more uncertainty.”
Businesses stockpiling inventory and consumers accelerating their purchasing decisions — buying an Apple iPhone now, say, rather than waiting until the fall — may inflate U.S. economic activity in April and lead to a slowdown in the coming months, Goolsbee suggested.
“Activity might look artificially high in the initial, and then by the summer, might fall off — because people have bought it all,” he said.
Sectors affected by Trump’s tariffs, particularly the auto industry, are most likely to heavily stock up on inventory now before import levies on goods from other countries potentially rise further, said Goolsbee. Many car parts, electronic components and other big-ticket consumer items are manufactured in China, for example, which currently faces a 145% total tariff rate on goods imported to the United States.
“We don’t know, 90 days from now, when they’ve revisited the tariffs, we don’t know how big they’re going to be,” Goolsbee said.
Some U.S. business owners who buy goods manufactured in China say they already can’t afford to place rush orders on inventory. Matt Rollens, owner and CEO of Granite Bay, California-based novelty drinkware company Dragon Glassware, says he’s temporarily holding his products in China because paying the 145% levy would force him to raise consumer prices by at least 50%, likely drying up customer demand.
Rollens has enough inventory in the U.S. to last roughly until June, and hopes the tariffs will be rolled back by then, he told CNBC Make It on April 11.
Short-term uncertainty and financial pain aside, the Fed’s Goolsbee expressed optimism about the country’s longer-term economic outlook.
“If we can get through this, it’s important to remember: The hard data coming into April was pretty good. The unemployment rate [was] around steady full employment, inflation [was] coming down,” he said. “It’s just a desire of people expressing they don’t want to back to ’21 and ’22, at a time when inflation was really raging out of control.”
IN HIS LOVE of lucre Donald Trump can be crass. In their pursuit of efficiency, free marketeers can be, too. Consider the sale of citizenship. Most people dislike the idea of treating national belonging as a commodity. Yet about a dozen countries hawk passports and more than 60, including America, offer residency in exchange for an investment or donation. Its “golden-visa” scheme is cumbersome, under-priced and inefficient. On this point the president and the market agree.