...or so says Bloomberg. It's always difficult to gauge how badly-hit the asset management industry has been by the financial crisis. Assets under management are down. That's natural. But people are also making less money and are more fearful of putting what money they do make into managed funds. What's more, the people who asset managers like to court most - the moderately wealthy and the coveted high net worth individual - are getting sparser, a trend that might not reverse anytime soon. According to the survey described by Bloomberg, there are now 242,000 people living in the UK with over £1m in assets, down from 489,000 in 2007.
These numbers reflect "the collapse in the property market, the fall in the values of shares and the 70 percent drop in City bonuses," Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the UK's Centre for Economics and Business Research, said per Bloomberg. "With property prices near to bottoming out, we would expect the number of millionaires to start to rise again in 2011."