In 2009 the world was home to 10m people who had at least $1m to invest, according to Capgemini, a consulting firm, and Merrill Lynch, an investment bank. Between them, such people had a total of $39 trillion in investible assets. That is 16.3% higher than last year's 8.6m, but still slightly lower than in 2007. America is home to 2.9m very wealthy people, over a quarter of the world's total. Although it had only 127,000 high-net-worth individuals in 2009, India saw the numbers of such people grow by over 50% last year alone. Among the countries studied, the chances of running into a very wealthy person are highest in Switzerland, where 30 out of every 1,000 people make the cut.