All is not quite as it seems on Forbes’s annual rich list

Right now, a team of researchers is putting the finishing touches to Forbes’s annual World’s Billionaires List.

- CHRIS BLACKHURST

When it is published shortly, it will shape our view of who holds the world’s wealth and where it is concentrated. The ranking and others like it are not presenting anything like the complete picture. By their own admission, they are working on incomplete information. What they are really showing are public filings and whatever people voluntarily disclose. They are also choosing to exclude certain types of people - in Forbes’s case, monarchs, heads of state, dictators.

Most of the Forbes data comes from one place: the US. There, any institutional investment manager with more than $100m (£75m) in qualifying assets must file a Form 13F with the SEC, disclosing their holdings in US-listed equities. Investors who acquire more than 5 per cent of a public company must file a Schedule 13D or 13G, revealing their identity and the size of their position. Anyone is covered, American or not. These filings are public.

Other countries do not have this requirement. Singapore, which hosts more than 2,000 single-family offices, has no equivalent; an investor can manage $10bn via a Singapore-registered vehicle and never appear in any public database. Dubai, Hong Kong, Switzerland, all magnets for the super-rich, are similarly relaxed.

The result is a global wealth map that is overwhelmingly American-flavoured. That is why you could be forgiven for supposing, as Donald Trump likes to tell us, that the US is full to bursting with billionaires — better at wealth generation than anywhere else, in fact.