Global household financial assets rose 8.6% in 2025 to a record €268.4 trillion (approximately $300 trillion) according to Allianz Research's 17th annual Global Wealth Report, released September 29, 2026.
The United States was the primary engine of that growth, generating 51.4% of the worldwide increase in financial assets - a dominance that reflects both the scale of American markets and the concentration of US household portfolios in equities. But the same exposure that powered client balance sheets through a historic run now leaves them disproportionately vulnerable to a reversal.
"Global wealth set another record in 2025, but that only tells half of the story," said Ludovic Subran, chief economist and chief investment officer at Allianz.
For advisors who counsel clients to look past headlines, the Allianz data offers some useful context. Nominal global financial assets climbed nearly 50% since 2019, but real growth amounted to just 23% after inflation. As of year-end 2025, real purchasing power sat only 5% above its 2021 level.
In the US specifically, markets did virtually all the work. Fresh savings globally fell 5.4% in 2025 to €4.1 trillion, while valuation gains accounted for roughly four out of every five euros of new household wealth worldwide, according to Allianz Research. In North America, new savings actually declined 17.5% as households pulled back on purchases of securities, insurance, and pension products.
The driver of that valuation surge is well understood: securities, including shares, bonds, and investment funds, rose 12.4% globally in 2025 - more than twice as fast as bank deposits, which grew 5.7%, and insurance and pension assets, which gained 5.0%.
US households had 61.4% of their financial portfolios in securities as of year-end 2025, the highest proportion of any major market, according to Allianz Research. That compares with an average securities allocation of roughly 46% in Western Europe. The S&P 500 rose approximately 95% between end-2022 and mid-2026, according to the report.
That lopsided portfolio structure has worked powerfully in the US's favor over the past decade and created a notable fragility. As advisors covering AI's impact on client portfolios have noted, concentrated exposure to AI-related technology stocks is now a structural feature of American household wealth.
Allianz Research has put numbers to the risk. In a downside scenario where corporate earnings disappoint and AI market expectations prove too optimistic, a 25% correction in the S&P 500 could wipe approximately $27 trillion from US household wealth - roughly 14% of total net worth, according to the report.
The resulting drag on consumer confidence and spending, combined with a collapse in AI-related investment, could push the US economy into recession. In that scenario, Allianz Research projects US GDP growth in 2027 would come in 2.0 percentage points below baseline.
A milder 15% correction, the report's base downside case, would produce a 5.8% drop in US household net wealth and shave approximately 0.6 percentage points from annual GDP - painful, but followed by a V-shaped recovery within six to nine months.
The concentration of those losses would also be uneven. The top 10% of US households own 87.3% of privately held corporate equities and mutual fund shares, according to Allianz Research, citing Federal Reserve distributional financial accounts data as of early 2026.
More than 55% of defined contribution pension entitlements are also concentrated among the wealthiest decile. For advisors working with mass-affluent clients, that points to a smaller but still meaningful exposure and a client conversation worth having now, rather than after a correction begins.
Allianz Research estimates that AI could affect approximately 1 in 4 jobs across major economies over the next three years, with reorganization expected to dominate, affecting around 10% of positions, compared with augmentation of 5% and displacement of 8%. That corresponds to approximately 52.5 million jobs in the US alone. Firms can deploy technology faster than workers can retrain, the report notes, meaning a transition gap could temporarily leave job displacement running ahead of new job creation.
One of the more instructive findings in the Allianz data concerns what has actually driven the performance gap between American and European household wealth.
North American financial assets grew an average of 6.9% annually over the past decade, versus 3.9% for Western Europe. The decisive difference was not savings behavior - Western European households actually added fresh savings equivalent to an average 2.4% of existing financial assets each year, compared with 2.1% for North Americans. What set the two apart was the market multiplier. Valuation gains accounted for 71% of North American financial-asset growth over the period but only 36% in Western Europe, according to the report.
Germany illustrates the point clearly. German financial assets grew a respectable 6.0% annually over the past decade, but that required fresh savings of 3.9% of existing assets annually - nearly twice the North American rate - with valuation gains accounting for only 33% of the increase.
For US advisors, that data reinforces a familiar but often under-appreciated point: portfolio structure matters as much as savings discipline. It also raises the question of whether current allocation levels are appropriate, given that US household equity exposure now stands approximately 7 percentage points above its long-term average, according to Allianz Research data cited in the report.
Coverage on billionaire portfolio concentration in AI stocks has highlighted similar exposure questions at the top of the wealth spectrum.
Advisors operating in the broader wealth management ecosystem may also note what the Allianz report found on distribution - and didn't find.
Globally, the richest 10% owned 85.4% of net financial assets in 2025, down from 91.5% in 2005. At the current pace of improvement, the report estimates it would take approximately eight more decades for global concentration to approach the levels seen within individual countries.
Within the US specifically, the top wealth decile increased its share of national net financial assets by 4.0 percentage points over the past two decades to 68.2%, one of the highest levels among advanced economies, according to the report. The ratio of average to median household wealth in the US remained virtually unchanged, underscoring that aggregate records in household wealth have not translated into meaningfully broader distribution.
Looking ahead, Allianz Research projects global financial assets will grow approximately 9% in 2026 (above the long-term average of 6.0%) before settling at a medium-term rate of 5% to 6% annually as fragmentation, persistent inflation, and elevated public debt constrain returns.
That forward outlook hinges heavily on whether corporate earnings can justify current AI-related valuations.
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