[santosha]

I'm not sure if this was addressed in the Credit Suisse report, but these kind of comparisons can be very misleading. The problem is that a lot of people in the bottom 10% have net negative assets (every fresh grad with college loan debt for eg). This skews the distributions, making the wealthy seem richer than they really are.

Suppose A has 50$, B has 30$ and C has -20$ (owes a creditor). A seems to control ~82% of all the wealth, but B is actually in much better shape than that number suggests.