The latest Billionaire Census' cash report released by Wealth-X and UBS has stated that billionaires hold an average of $600 millions in cash each, amounting to around 19 percent of their net worth in cash; the number means a jump upside of $60 million from last year's Billionaire Census' cash report, and according to CNBC, this sum is actually greater than the entire gross domestic product of countries like Dominica.
The Billionaire Census' cash study also reports that, as a matter of fact, these billionaires' cash holdings are actually much greater than what they've invested in real estate, as their average investments in this area circle $160 million per billionaire - which is really only about one fifth of their cash holdings. The Billionaire Census' cash study claims this happens because these people are holding out in search for better deals to invest in different areas, whether they are real estate opportunities or even new technologies.
According to the report made by the Billionaire Census, cash seems for billionaires a much safer mode of saving, after the scares of the 2008 recession and the troubles within the European Union and the subsequent instability of the euro as a currency.
According to Simon Smiles, Chief Investment Officer for Ultra High Net Worth at UBS, the new trend of cash hoarding is "the combination of many people having been under-invested in equities and under-invested in wide risk assets having seen rallies and missed those rallies. Things are no longer cheap, and it's emotionally hard to get invested now."
Smiles also points out that it's not only billionaires who are currently hoarding cash - it is also millionaires and multimillionaires, who even do so at a much higher rate, comparatively; on average, millionaires and multimillionaires will actually keep from 20 to 30 percent of their entire net worth in cash.