June 15, 2004

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The millionaires are back.

After taking a bruising in the past few years amid the stock market swoon, one in 125 people in the United States could call themselves a millionaire in 2003, up 14 percent from a year earlier, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing a report conducted by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini.

That's about 0.8 percent of the U.S. population.

The United States and Canada added more millionaires last year than Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East combined, according to the report.

In the previous year, the number of rich had declined as the United States entered a recession. But as the world's largest economy emerges from its slump, the rich have staged a strong rebound.

"While the wider populations of most countries are just starting to feel the effects of recovery, [high-net-worth individuals] as a group have been enjoying the fruits of recovery for the last 12 months," the Merrill/Capgemini report said, according to the Journal.

Although the number of Americans with $1 million or more in investable assets grew to 2.27 million in 2003, up from 2 million in 2002, the rich continue to control a disproportionate amount of the country's wealth.

The wealthiest 5 percent of Americans controlled 59.2 percent of the nation's wealth in 2001, the newspaper reported, citing a study conducted by New York University that takes home equity into account. The Merrill/Capgemini report does not include home equity.

http://money.cnn.com/2004/06/15/pf/millionaires/index.htm?cnn=yes