The numbers come first.
Global households grew $40 trillion richer in 2025, pushing total household net worth to $570 trillion — a 7.3% jump that outpaced the 5.9% average annual growth rate recorded since 2000, according to McKinsey Global Institute's newly released Global Balance Sheet 2026: Imbalance and Divergence report. The world's overall balance sheet of assets swelled to nearly $1.8 quadrillion, more than quadruple its nominal value from 2000.
The headline caveat is stark: only about 20% of the new household wealth came from real capital formation — actual investment in productive assets. Equities alone accounted for 57% of new wealth, versus just 15% from real estate. That marks a sharp reversal from the 2000–2024 pattern, when real estate drove the majority of gains.
The United States is the engine — and the concentration risk.
U.S. equity values reached 2.4 times corporate net assets in 2025, nearly double the historical average. Just over half of S&P 500 market-cap growth from 2021 through 2025 is attributable to the 'Magnificent Seven' AI-linked mega-cap stocks, according to McKinsey. The U.S. now accounts for nearly half of all corporate equity value among major economies globally, a share that has grown substantially over the past 15 years. American corporate earnings — and specifically AI monetization — have become, in McKinsey's framing, a linchpin for global wealth stability.
The U.S. and Australia posted the strongest per-capita household wealth performance, each expanding by at least 20 percentage points of GDP. Most other countries saw wealth per capita grow, but not fast enough to keep pace with GDP — a gap McKinsey attributes to slowing real-estate values, which remain the largest component of household wealth in most economies.
China's path is debt, not equity.
While American balance sheets inflated on rising equity multiples, China's growth came through debt accumulation. Corporate debt there reached 80% of real assets — against a 50% global norm — and 1.7 times GDP, even as declining property values dragged down Chinese household wealth. McKinsey frames this divergence as central to its 'imbalance and divergence' thesis: the world's two largest economies are each stretching their balance sheets through fundamentally different, equally precarious mechanisms.
Three exits — none of them comfortable.
McKinsey identified three ways a balance sheet this 'out of kilter' with the underlying economy can resolve: higher productivity, higher inflation, or asset-price corrections. A fourth path — secular stagnation, effectively 'kicking the can down the road' — is also possible. The institute noted that every single one of these scenarios remains live for every major economy.
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CEO Times reads the data this way: The bull case is straightforward — if AI delivers genuine productivity gains at scale, the equity multiples baked into U.S. balance sheets could prove earned rather than speculative. Free enterprise has a long history of making skeptics look wrong. But the bear case is also on the table: when 80 cents of every new dollar of household wealth is a mark-to-market entry rather than a factory built or a service delivered, the wealth is only as durable as investor confidence. The taxpayer should watch this closely. A sharp equity correction would not stay on Wall Street; it would travel fast to pension funds, 401(k)s and the federal balance sheet. Capital rewards clear rules and real productivity — and right now, the world is running well ahead of both.
