In a tantalising foretaste of the launch this week of the Merrill Lynch, Capgemini World Wealth Report, Financial News has estimated that the wealth of the world’s richest people is likely to have increased by 11 per cent to $37 trillion last year. The estimate is based upon the sharp rise in asset values around the globe last year and will lead to an increase that is 37 per cent higher than the annual 8 per cent growth rate achieved over previous years, according to the newspaper. Further evidence of accelerated wealth has recently been provided by US research firm Cerulli, which says that the global asset management industry managed $48 trillion at the end of last year, a 13.7 per cent rise during the year. And UK real estate advisor Knight Frank has estimated that prime residential property rose in value globally by 14 per cent last year. Much of the world’s wealth is released through the capital markets, and data from Thomson Financial shows that mergers and acquisitions in Europe for this year have nearly doubled from the first half in 2006 to reach $1.3 trillion. Chief executives of wealth managers and private banks predict that their assets under management will increase at a rate of 30 per cent per annum and that industry AuMs will grow by 23 per cent, according to last week’s PricewaterhouseCoopers 2007 Global Private Banking/Wealth Management Survey, implying that they are confident of increasing share of wallet that the world’s rich entrust to them.