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Wednesday, 14 September 2022

Lebanon is seeing a spate of bank robberies as people try to get their own money, but let’s have a moment of silence for the b’naires

How bad is Lebanon’s banking crisis? People are robbing banks — to get their own money: Two armed Lebanese citizens entered two separate banks in Lebanon today to retrieve money from their own accounts, which have been frozen since the country spiraled into a financial crisis in 2019, Reuters reports. The two incidents were apparently not connected to each other. One woman managed to retrieve USD 13k from her account and walked out following a “brief hostage situation,” while another man entering a different bank got his hands on “a portion of his money before he handed himself over to security forces and was detained.”

Meanwhile, please bring out the world’s smallest violin for the world’s richest b’naires, who lost a combined USD 93 bn yesterday, recording their ninth-worst daily drop after US stocks suffered their worst day since June 2020 on the back of higher-than-expected August inflation figures, Bloomberg reported, citing its bn’aire index. The S&P 500 index tumbled 4.3% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 5.2% yesterday on the news. This comes shortly after the bn’aires’ combined fortune dropped USD 1.4 tn in July.

Who lost what? Jeff Bezos topped the losers list, seeing his net worth drop USD 9.8 bn to USD 150 bn — but remains the second wealthiest person in the world. Elon Musk followed with a USD 8.4 bn loss, but remains the world’s richest person with a USD 256 bn fortune.

The bigger picture: The world’s 500 richest have lost a combined USD 1.2 tn since the beginning of the year. Mark Zuckerberg and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao both lost more than half of their net worth.

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