People will assume CPA is for accounting and CFA is for finance. But dang Iteracom, 18 more charterholders in 18 days since you started this thread? Oh boy… in 3-5 years, all those asians taking the CFA exams right now will be done and the number of charterholders will increase dramatically, not as much as the current candidates of course since most are in IT in China or India.
Indeed. It’s a very specialized profession, not sure why anyone needs 100,000 charterholders.
someone confirm how many CPAs there are in the United States and CAs in the United Kingdom. A LOT more.
~150,000 people EVERY YEAR get an MBA, from the prestigious Harvard MBA to the crap Devry online MBA
Suddenly, the 100,300 CFA charterholders worldwide doesn’t seem so bad, and CFAI has been around since 1964
I must admit the MBA can be applied to any field though, but there’s no way finance jobs in ER and AM needs 100,000+ charterholders.
^ We’re not all in ER and AM.
Just warning you all, but add one more to the list by the end of this year. Teehee
well peeps, in just 3 short years, the official CFAI statistics are that the world has 123,836 charterholders. almost ~24k people added in 3 years.
http://www.cfainstitute.org/programs/cfaprogram/charter/professions/pages/index.aspx
interesting observation though. if you add up the jobs that charterholders hold, id argue around 40-50% of charterholders have jobs that really don’t need the CFA
there are approximatrely 110000 Chartered accountants in india…and here’s a fun fact over the last 4 years ca institute easied down on there results a bit and the pass %age of finals came around 15%-the average campus placements dipped down… then starting nov-13 they reduced the pass %age again and its between 3-8% now and the avergae campus placement now is between 750000-900000 p.a for a fresher which is somewhat fine
In a matter of no time, the number of MBAs will catch up to the number of charter holders.
I haven’t dug up the latest figures from the BEA, but according to the Wikipedia page on the Economy of the U.S., in 2010, the finance industry constituted some 50% of the total non-farm business profits in the U.S. Furthermore, I know that finance is the second-largest sector after technology in the S&P 500. So it seems as though when compared against the employement portion of that economic slice, even 300,000 charterholders is but a drop in the bucket.
I will note, though, the same Wikipedia page points to an interesting IMF study conducted in 2012 that suggests financial sector growth has been so much that it is actually slowing economic growth, with other economists concluding that the sector needs to shrink by 20 percent. Harvard and UChicago researchers estimated that for every dollar that R+D people earn, they add $5 to GDP, whereas for every dollar that finance industry workers earn, they cause GDP to shrink by 60 cents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#Finance
Not sure how bogus any of these numbers are, but it is an interesting perspective.
Bonus: As to the person who earlier (not sure if it was in the early part of this thread or not) asked about the number of CPAs, I found several sites seeming to point that this number is currenly well above 600,000. Now, I despise, despise comparisons of CFA with CPA, but in this case, I’m happy to provide a relative measurement to show how the CFA population is still relatively small.
My comment about MBAs was facetious. This site suggests that there are over 150,000 new MBAs graduating every year (I believe in the U.S.). the total number of charterholders, meanwhile, is international.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/master-of-business-administration-stats-mba/
Of course, in a highly skewed income and wealth distribution it is easier and easier to argue that there are too many people with educations of any sort.
^ I do believe the statistics are that 40-50% of college grads end up taking a job that doesn’t require a college degree. That definitely says something.
There are 184,000 active lawyers in the State of California. I am just sayin…