Interesting article from the New York Times:
But China, the world’s most populous nation, has already become the biggest global car market, having overtaken the United States earlier this year. And Credit Suisse forecast last month that China’s share of global consumption would overtake that of the United States by 2020. China’s population of “high net worth individuals” — those worth $1 million or more — surpassed that of Britain for the first time last year, according to an annual study published by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch in June. North America, Japan and Germany together still accounted for 54 percent of the global total, but the authors of the report also predicted that Asia-Pacific would surpass North America by 2013. Last month, a list compiled by Hurun Report, a research and publishing house based in Shanghai, found that the number of known U.S.-dollar billionaires in China had grown to 130, up from 101 in 2008. – from NYTimes