Feeling rich

Congratulations all you newly rich people out there. Bet you thought you were actually the ‘‘squeezed middle’’ – those poor saps paying all the tax while the truly wealthy hide their assets away in what the financial industry calls ‘‘tax vehicles’’ and the rest of us call ‘‘rorts’’.

It turns out we’re all richer than we thought; so much so that we’re the fifth richest country in the world. At least that’s the view of the Credit Suisse Research Institute – but given that it’s from the spiritual home of financial legerdemain, it might be an idea that’s as cuckoo as its clocks. According to the institute, our wealth per adult is inferior only to the Swiss, Hong Kong, the US and Australia, and a fair few of us live in that rarefied air breathed only by Bill Gates and his plutocrat mates in the richest 1 per cent.

But New Zealand doesn’t really feel like that, does it? It’s because the Swiss have based their sums on bankers’ favourite type of money – the hypothetical kind. We’re considered so rich because our houses are worth so much. So yes, if we sold our homes, we could bask in the warm glow of wealth. But it wouldn’t last long if we had nowhere to live. That’s not a concern that troubles the real rich with their multiple homes.

The rest of us, meanwhile, are not so well off that we don’t have to go back to work on Tuesday. Like a daydream about winning Lotto, the thrill of riches was nice for a moment or two. But we know it was all just more baloney from the banking industry that crashed the global economy and deprived us of genuine financial improvement for at least a decade. We could say it’s a bit rich, coming from them.