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Bill Gates's Net Worth Hits $90 Billion (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Bloomberg: The net worth of the world's richest person Bill Gates hit $90 billion on Friday, fueled by gains in public holdings including Canadian National Railway Company and Ecolab Inc. Gates's fortune is now $13.5 billion bigger than that of the world's second-wealthiest person, Spanish retail mogul Amancio Ortega, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At $90 billion, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder's net worth is equal to 0.5 percent of U.S. GDP. Less than two weeks ago, Bill Gates topped Forbes' "100 Richest Tech Billionaires In The World 2016" (Warning: may be paywalled) list with an estimated fortune of $78 billion.
Caveat-- I think Dick Cheney is an evil piece of garbage who should hang for his crimes, but "Compare that to Dick Cheney who deliberately outed an undercover CIA agent for political vindictiveness." is just stupid and the least of his crimes.
Valerie Plame was the wife of an ambassador. She was not an undercover CIA agent to any reasonable person. She was an overt CIA agent. Anyone of *any* country associated with an embassy *is* a spy. That's the entire fucking point of embassies. Have you never played Civilization? Embassies are the "honor among thieves" of spy craft, diplomatic immunity and whatnot.
That being said, I would love Cheney's energy meetings to be declassified. That's where you're going to find some seriously evil shit.
The central banks of the world are conjuring money out of thin air and using it to buy stocks, which are ownership claims on real businesses with real assets, made of real materials in a universe dominated by the laws of thermodynamics [1]. Think about this absurdity and the implications for holders of fiat currency.
Therefore, the marginal buyer is increasingly a central bank that can create as much money as it wants, consequences be damned. When this ends, I suspect equities, like most other asset classes, will have a long fall back to reality.
Concurrently, interest rates are artificially low, leading to all sorts of chicanery and malinvestments. Shares of dividend-paying blue chips, such as Microsoft, are bid higher and higher as income-seeking investors search for yield wherever they can. However, the price you pay for future cash flows absolutely matters and determines your return; at current valuations, I suspect there will be a lot of tears for equity holders.
Between the third central bank-induced financial bubble in less than 20 years and Trump/Clinton, I'm starting to think I'm on a bizarro Earth 2 or something.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article...