Weekly Digest: Tesla’s $1 Trillion, China facing stagflation

Newsdesk

5 minutes read

Oct 28, 2021

Tesla CEO Elon Musk giving a speech after Tesla market value surpasses $1 trillion

28/10/21: Musk becomes the richest person in recorded history after Tesla broke the $1 trillion valuation mark, shiba inu meme token hits record high, China faces “stagflation.” And more.

Investment news

The gold price consolidated around the $1,800 level on Thursday, supported by a pullback in U.S. bond yields as investors' focus has shifted toward the Bank of Japan and European Central Bank meetings, looking for clues on whether they would consider tightening monetary policy earlier than thought. (Reuters)

Eurozone inflation reached a 13-year high in September, mainly due to higher energy prices, rising car prices, and higher accommodation costs.

“We see scope for the ECB to continue its pushback against current market pricing in its communications at the meeting. The flipside of pushing back against market pricing is that we also expect Christine Lagarde to maintain that the current spike in inflation is largely transitory,” Spyros Adreopoulos, senior European economist at BNP Paribas, said.

“Wild $T1mes!” Everyone’s lauding Tesla’s astonishing rise to a more than $1 trillion market value on Monday. (Bloomberg)

In just one trading session, Tesla added $118 billion to its worth, or almost double that of Ford Motor Co.’s entire market capitalization.

Elon Musk’s wealth has also skyrocketed alongside the climb in Tesla’s stock price. He is now the richest man in the world, with a net worth of about $281 billion.

The risk of stagflation is “very real” in China over the next couple of months amid an ongoing power crunch that hurts the country’s economic growth, an analyst said. (CNBC)

In China, the producer price index increased 10.7% in September compared with a year ago, marking the fastest pace since October 1996.

“I think we are in a situation where there are a lot of factors weighing on growth right now that are not going away anytime soon and we are probably not getting aggressive Chinese stimulus over the next few months. That is going to be a different dynamic for the world to adjust to,” said Charlene Chu, senior analyst for China macro-financial at Autonomous Research.

Chinese authorities told billionaire Hui Ka Yan, founder of the indebted property giant Evergrande, to use his personal wealth to ease the company’s deepening debt crisis, according to people familiar with the matter. (Bloomberg)

The demand for Hui to use his own fortune to pay Evergrande’s debt suggests that Beijing is reluctant to launch a government rescue of Evergrande, even as the crisis has started to spread to other developers in the real estate market.

The famous dog-inspired meme token shiba inu, or SHIB, hit an all-time high of $0.0000594 on Wednesday. It now ranks 11 among the leading cryptocurrencies by market value. (CNBC)

Dubbed “dogecoin killer” by its supporters, shiba inu is up more than 111% over the past week, and is trailing closely behind dogecoin, which now ranks 10.

Based on the Ethereum blockchain, shiba inu was created in August 2020 by an anonymous individual or individuals known as “Ryoshi.” The creator describes the coin as “an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building.”

Opinion

Failure to respond quickly to persistent inflation could lead to the biggest monetary policy mistake in more than 40 years. While the risk can still be avoided, the Fed is running out of time of doing it, economist Mohamed El-Erian says. (Bloomberg)

“Such a scenario — of a delayed and partial response initially, followed by big catch-up tightening — would constitute the biggest monetary policy mistake in more than 40 years. It would derail President Joe Biden’s transformational policy agenda and unnecessarily undermine America’s economic and financial well-being. It would also transmit avoidable waves of instability throughout the global economy,” El-Erian wrote in an article.

What else is happening

U.S. billionaires feel the heat: Senate Democrats unveiled the new billionaires' tax proposal earlier this week, presenting it as an entirely new entry in the tax code. Elon Musk railed the plan, tweeting: “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you.” (Bloomberg)

“The Billionaires Income Tax would ensure billionaires pay tax every year, just like working Americans. No working person in America thinks it’s right that they pay their taxes and billionaires don’t,” said the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chairman of the Senate finance committee who authored the new billionaire tax proposal.

A group of more than 800 U.S. billionaires hold over $5 trillion altogether. They have more than doubled their collective net worth in the last five years.

Where did all the money go?? When the Covid-19 pandemic erupted last year, the IMF disbursed $118 billion in emergency loans to help 87 countries to make it through the crisis. Now the IMF is asking some countries to conduct independent investigations of how these emergency funds were spent. In Africa, Latin America, and other regions, some officials have ended up in jail. (Bloomberg)

Only a small number of countries have made information from these independent investigations public, and what’s available shows that a large amount of the aid funds — hundreds of millions of dollars — were misappropriated.

Turkish lira hits a new record low after President Erdogan threatened Western diplomats with “persona non grata” status. (CNBC)

The lira had already hit a record low last week after Turkey’s central bank cut its key interest rate in spite of growing inflation.

“If Erdogan’s threat is carried out it would trigger the worst crisis between Turkey and the Western world since the AKP [Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party] got into power in 2002,” analysts say.

Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has unveiled plans to develop a commercial space station called "Orbital Reef", in cooperation with Boeing. The aim is to launch the spacecraft in the second half of this decade. (Reuters)

Orbital Reef will be operated as a "mixed use business park", and is expected to provide the infrastructure needed to increase economic activity and open new markets in space, Blue Origin said.

And finally…

🐶 A lucky shiba inu trader reportedly bought $3,400 in crypto last August - and it's now worth a whopping $1.55 billion! (Cointelegraph)

The anonymous investor started trading on August 1, 2020 when they bought about 70 billion SHIB coins in just one day.


 See you next week! 

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