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The collapse of world stock markets has significantly dropped the assets of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Bernard Arnault.
Simple recovery after a year of euphoria or warning signs of a spit? The next few days will tell. But for the past few days, a wave of panic has gripped global stock markets. In Paris, the CAC 40 fell 2.75% on Monday, the Dow Jones dropped almost 2% on Wall Street and the Nasdaq plunged 4.29%.
Particularly intense tremors at the highest level of the ranking of the greatest fortunes on the planet. Over the last three trading sessions, the four richest people in the world have together lost $75 billion.
Elon Musk, who weighed in at $268 billion last week, is worth “only” $229 according to Bloomberg Billionaires. Jeff Bezos went from $150 billion to $133 billion. Bill Gates capped the breakout with a 7 billion ($120 billion) retracement. Finally Bernard Arnault left the podium with a drop from 132 to 120 billion dollars in a few days.
If the fall has accelerated in recent days, it has been latent since the beginning of the year. Jeff Bezos thus lost close to 60,000 million dollars in 2022, Bernard Arnault 58, Mark Zuckerberg 53 and Elon Musk more than 41.
chinese fears
A landing that hits with more force the technological values that had made the most progress in a year. Thus, the largest technology companies in the world have erased more than 1,000 billion dollars in three stock market sessions. Since last Wednesday, Apple has lost $220 billion in capitalization, Tesla $199 billion, Microsoft 189 and Amazon 173.
It is the future evolution of monetary policies that remains the biggest concern for investors, according to analysts. Awash in cheap money, global stock markets and tech stocks in particular continued to grow during the pandemic. But with inflation returning, central banks began to tighten the wallet strings by raising interest rates.
“The prospect of a recession, while inflation would decline very slowly, helped to reduce almost all asset classes last week, indicates the team of strategists at La Banque Postale Asset Management. “Yields increased considerably, reducing the value of bonds, while stocks fell sharply. This volatility is likely to remain very present.”
A pessimism accentuated by the Chinese situation. The country’s Covid zero strategy has led it to enact new lockdowns that continue to hamper recovery. Thus, China’s exports grew in April at its weakest rate in almost two years (+3.9%), the Customs said on Monday, in the when the shanghai closure strongly penalizes economic activity.
warren buffett floats
Faced with these worrying prospects, investors prefer to resort to safe securities. In the United States, the agri-food companies Campbell Soup and General Mills are benefiting from the technological disaster and in France, distribution with Carrefour has risen 28% since the beginning of the year.
A fall that notably benefits the American billionaire Warren Buffett, the only one among the 10 largest fortunes in the world who has seen his wealth increase in 2022. The dean of investors (91 years old) has earned 4,600 million dollars in the last four months.
Unlike some of the richest people on the planet, Warren Buffett is not dependent on the fluctuations in the stock price of a single large company. The head of the Berkshire Hathaway hedge fund manages a diversified portfolio that has stakes in Coca-Cola restaurants, American Express, Dairy Queen and even Geico insurer. Very established groups less sensitive to market fluctuations.
