While shopping in one of the Hermes luxury stores (famous for their tasteful products and eye-popping prices - among other things, the company is a shareholder of the Jean-Paul Gaultier design house), Kathy Fuld, the wife of Dick Fuld, former CEO of investment bank Lehman Brothers, declined to have its products put in the well known bag which displays a horse and carriage above the "HERMES", name, a symbol which has become synonymous to expensiveness - asking instead to have them packaged in plain white paper.
This gesture was viewed as illustrative for the changes in the behavior of the richest people on the planet, after the onset of the world crisis: "The rich are now self-conscious when it comes to ostentatious consumption ", the HNWI experts concluded ("High Net Worth Individuals") - the group of people who own the biggest fortunes in the world.
The HNWI notion is a concept.
* ULTRA-HNWI = 0.01% OF THE WORLD"S POPULATION
The definition of the HNWI concept is not unanimous, as some people provide it with specific values from one bank to the next, or from one fiscal conception to the next, but the best known characterization belongs to the annual reports drawn up by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini:
"1. HNWIs are people who own investable assets of one million dollars or more, excluding their primary residence, their collections [ed. note - for instance stamp and painting collections, etc.], consumables and long-term goods.
2. Middle HNWIs ("mid-tier millionaires") are those who own 5 to 30 million in investable assets.
3. Ultra-HNWI who have over 30 million in investable assets."
Contrarily to the image created by Romanian economic publications, which throw around all kinds of unprofessionally created millionaire charts, the number of HNWIs all over the world, has never exceeded 11 million people, spanning all continents
