Journal for Jurisdiction Planning

Standing instrument · Version 1.0 · July 2026

JP Custody Map

Where your assets are held is a chokepoint you occupy, and it is not the same as where you pay tax. Tax residence decides what you owe. Custody jurisdiction decides who can freeze what you own, on whose authority, and how fast, whatever your passport says. This is the ledger of what has been frozen, the rails that hold and move the world's money, and the gradient from most reachable to least.

Where the wealth is

Total private wealth by country: the savings, property, and investments of a nation's households. The concentration is extreme. The United States and China hold more than half of it between them, and the ten richest countries hold about four-fifths. Click any country for its figure and why the wealth gathers there.

Private wealth world map Author: Al MacDonald Editor: Fritz Lekschas License: CC BY-SA 3.0 ID: ISO 3166-1 or "_[a-zA-Z]" if an ISO code is not available
Total private wealth · ~150 countries · UBS Global Wealth Report end-2024 for the largest economies, the Global Wealth Databook end-2022 for the rest

$50tn+$10–50tn$3–10tn$1–3tn$0.3–1tnunder $0.3tnnot measured

The largest economies carry end-2024 figures; smaller ones are end-2022, and many are the databook's own model estimates rather than measured national accounts, sound enough to place a country in a band but not to quote to the dollar. Four countries stay grey because no defensible figure exists: Cuba, Somalia, South Sudan, and war-torn Sudan.

Click a country on the map to see its private wealth and where it gathers.

Who holds it

Private wealth does not sit with its owners. It sits with a small number of banks that manage and custody it, and a court reaches the bank, not the person. The figures below are not one measurement: American firms report broad client assets that include custody and brokerage, while the Swiss and European houses report narrower managed assets. Read the metric column. UBS is the largest pure private bank in the world; the American firms above it are larger only on the broader count.

BankHomeAssetsMetric

Family offices

Where it is booked

A large share of private wealth is booked far from where its owners live, in a handful of centres whose whole business is holding other countries' money. This is the custody chokepoint in its purest form: the jurisdiction that books the wealth is the jurisdiction that can freeze it. Estimates of the total offshore put it between 14 and 16 trillion dollars.

The freeze ledger

Every major freeze of state or private wealth in this century, with the amount, the date, where it is held, and where it stands. Click any row for the full account.

No.PartyAmountSinceStatus

The rails

The infrastructure that actually holds and moves the world's money. Each is a place someone can be told to stop.

The exposure gradient

From most reachable to least. This is an analytic frame, not advice, and each rung trades one risk for another.

    Why it matters

    A family can hold the right passport, live in the right country, and still keep its wealth where a single foreign vote or a single US instruction can freeze it. Custody is the visibility pressure point of The Sovereign Family, made concrete: not where a treasury can see your wealth, but where a court or a council can reach it. The Atlas and the Risk Index score the country you live in; this map reads the jurisdictions your money lives in, which are often not the same.

    Cite this publication

    Journal for Jurisdiction Planning (2026). JP Custody Map, v1.0. jurisdictionplanning.org/custody. Last reviewed 20 July 2026.