Billionaires suffering too - numbers dropping all over the world

If you are a sub-prime mortgage borrower, struggling to hold on your house, or an employee facing the threat of redundancy, you may not have a thought to spare for the world's wealthiest, but here's another line on the credit crisis: billionaires are suffering, too.

An eye-popping $US2 trillion of the combined worth of the planet's billionaires has been evaporated over the past year. More than 300 people who could claim that prestigious label last year can no longer do so - that's 30 per cent of them. Warren Buffett, the US investor who used to be the world's richest man, has taken a $25bn hit, putting his bridge partner Bill Gates back at the top of the pack. The 10 biggest dollar-losers between them have this year lost more than the annual GDP of Ireland.

All these statistics and more are contained in the latest survey of the global billionaire set by Forbes magazine, which is the official arbiter of these matters. With stock markets plunging, businesses failing and bankers calling in the giant loans that they ill-advisedly extended during the boom times, the super-rich are facing difficulties they never prepared for.

"We are chronicling something unprecedented: the billionaire bust," says Steve Forbes, the multi-millionaire founder of the magazine. "The global economy has been battered by a financial hurricane. Without the easy flow of credit, the economy shrivels, and that is what is happening today. It is no surprise that billionaires are being battered, too.

"Of course, no tears will be shed for the billionaires whose net worth is going down, but remember that these people created their own businesses - they are innovators and entrepreneurs, and they have made it possible for other people to get ahead and realise their dreams."

As the credit crisis has spread from the US, sweeping through Europe and on to the once-booming emerging markets of India, China and others, fortunes have revealed to have been built on sand. Russia, flush with riches from oil and other commodities, boasted 87 billionaires this time last year. Now it is down to 32 - and many of those are living on the largesse of the Russian state, thanks to an estimated $11bn in government bailouts. India and Turkey have each lost well over half their billionaires. Across the globe, the number who can boast a fortune over a thousand million US dollars has shrivelled from 1,125 to 793.

There is something lustrous about that title "billionaire" which makes the annual Forbes list a must-read, not just for voyeurs of the rich and famous, but also for the rich and famous themselves. Some tycoons have been known to hire public relations firms to make sure that the magazine does not miss them off. Donald Trump, the orange-haired icon of capitalist excess, once sued the writer of a book that claimed Forbes had got it wrong and he was not really a billionaire at all. (For the record, the magazine this year calculates Trump's wealth at $1.6bn, despite the bankruptcy of one of his casinos businesses. That is down from $3bn in 2008, but not as bad a hit as it could have been. "We're not going down, we're going up," he insists. "We're buying things we couldn't have dreamed of buying two years ago.")

The vast list of people who have lost their claim to billionaire status is every bit as interesting as the list of those that remain - if not more so.

Sir Anthony O'Reilly, controlling shareholder of Independent News & Media, owner of The Independent, is another name to disappear this year, having seen parts of his Waterford Wedgwood china and crystal business fall into receivership.

But it is the finance industry, the epicentre of the earthquake and blamed for the economic tsunami that followed, where the lost fortunes are the largest. Sandy Weill, the man who built Citigroup, is no longer among the American billionaire set - and his company exists still only thanks to $45bn in federal handouts.

Hank Greenberg, whose expansion of the insurance company AIG saw it morph into a trader of toxic derivatives, can no longer enjoy a billionaire's retirement n and his company had to be nationalised to avoid its losses bringing down the entire financial system.

Of the men who remain - and they are largely men; only 72 are women, and just seven of those are self-made billionaires - few can boast of increasing their fortunes in the maelstrom of the past year. Michael Bloomberg, the founder of the business information company that bears his name, is a rare exception, bolstering the claim to economic competence that he is using to justify a third term as mayor of New York in elections this year.

And there are some newcomers, too, including Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi royal who bought Manchester City last year, whose fortune is estimated at $4.9bn, and two Chinese businessmen, Zhou Chengjian, the designer-turned-retailer, and Wang Chuanfu, whose firm makes electric cars. Also on the list is Mexico's most wanted man, drug baron Joaquin Guzman Loera, who has a $5m bounty on his head from the US government for flooding the country with cocaine.

THE INDEPENDENT