The world, according to McKinsey, has never been wealthier. Planet Earth, even when wracked by a pandemic and lockdowns, keeps on ringing up the tills. Totting up the value of real assets — buildings, machinery and so forth — and financial assets for 10 of the biggest countries, gives a global balance sheet of $1,540tn.

That, says McKinsey Global Institute, an offshoot of the management consultancy, is a fourfold increase on 2000. Net of liabilities this wealth equates to about six times gross domestic product also sharply higher than the multiple of 4.5 times two decades ago.

Where has the new wealth come from? Unsurprisingly, the two biggest countries brought in the bulk of the growth in net worth: half from China and almost a quarter from the US. Economist Thomas Piketty is right: at a household level, the rich are getting richer. The top 10 per cent in both countries own more than two-thirds of the wealth. In avowedly capitalist America, the bottom half share out just 1.5 per cent; in China — a country in pursuit of “common prosperity” — the comparable figure was 6 per cent in 2015.