By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 23rd, 2024
According to the expert, “today, the market is down because of the Chinese real estate contagion threat, despite many good headlines recently on Covid.”
A Bloomberg report has revealed that a global rout has hit the stock market, and that decline has indirectly affected the world’s fortunes, with the wealthiest 500 people collectively losing $135 billion of their fortunes on Monday.
In the Bloomberg Billionaires Index report, the electric carmaker, Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, led the fortune list decline, as his world-leading net worth nosedived by $7.2 billion to $198 billion. The founder and former chief executive officer of Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN), Jeff Bezos, lost $5.6 billion, plummeting its net value to $194.2 billion.
This appears as a spillover of the current financial situation of Evergrande, plus the Chinese regulatory crackdown on the real estate giant and the second-largest property developer ranked on the 2021 Fortune Global 500 List, which has been causing fear of possible adverse effects.
Its founder and Chairman, Hui Ka Yan, one of the wealthiest 500 on the fortune’s list, has continually dropped on Bloomberg’s wealth ranking. The company’s stocks dipped below the lowest within a few years. Currently, his net worth has plunged to $7.3 billion from the $42 billion peaks it stood in 2017.
Aside from Evergrande, also included in this loss, Hong Kong’s biggest property developers suffered huge losses on Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index. Additionally, property billionaires Lee Shau-Kee, Yang Huiyan, Li Ka-Shing, and Henry Cheng collectively lost $6 billion of their fortune.
Colin Huang, the founder of e-commerce platform Pinduoduo Inc. has seen his net value depreciate by $29.4 billion in this year. This is more significant than anyone else in China, as he also lost $2.3 billion on Monday.
It is worth adding the Monday event on stock also fell Nasdaq down by more than 3 percent. Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT), Google-owner Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL), Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB), and several others were among stocks that saw the biggest losses today.
The S&P 500 is down by 4.8 percent from its intra-day record high hit on Sept 2 and is on track to snap a seven-month winning streak.
Speaking on the Monday stock decline, Jake Dollarhide, CEO of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said that “today, the market is down because of the Chinese real estate contagion threat, despite many good headlines recently on Covid.”
He added that “We’re due for a correction,” he said. “It’s like the market is addicted to buying the dip. Every time it goes down 5% or 6%, all this liquidity jumps in to prop us back up.”
Read more business news on Coinspeaker.