Is there a measure of the most fully liquid richest person? i.e. the individual that holds the most cash.
They're currently pegging Gates at sitting on $43 billion in cash out of his $90.8 billion total fortune. His investment vehicle, Cascade, is well known; I assume that's one way Bloomberg is attempting to keep tabs on the cash level. I've occasionally checked Bill's numbers on the Bloomberg Billionaire's list, I don't recall his cash level ever being so high. You can essentially guarantee that if the $43b is even remotely accurate, nobody else on earth is topping that (save for an extraordinarily rich leader / royalty, but even then $43b is immense).
Most of the richest billionaires have their wealth heavily tied up in one or a few businesses. Gates, among the hyper billionaires, is rare in the sense that he's basically sitting on a giant investment portfolio at this point, meaning he can turn most of it to cash dramatically easier than his peers.
But, I don't know any of this, just speculating. Do you know more?
Escobar at his height had an estimated wealth of $30bn - with inflation that is very much in the same ballpark.
And he had a huge share of his wealth in cash - you might know the anecdote that his operation spent $2,500 a month on rubber bands to bundle up cash...
Nobody knows what the wealth of today's global drug kingpins is, but I would be surprised if El Chapo Guzmán weren't worth tens of billions.
Wow, that is very shocking! I frankly thought there was too much chaos to obtain >$10bn. Hell, I'd even be impressed with >$1bn. Guess I don't give them enough credit, and I also give countries ability to manage the crime lords too much credit.
See: 2007-2009.
Gates for example, is dedicating his wealth to important causes such as eliminating malaria. If he does something foolish and rides a massive stock market bubble back down while he's fully invested, that could mean $30 or $40 billion less for attacking such problems in the next 10-20 years (there's no guarantee the market will come back to these levels soon, it could take a decade or multiple decades).
If the market drops and stays low, he could easily be put into a situation where it's again time to perform some asset liquidation for funding purposes for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That is, those market 'losses' would become non-recoverable at that point.
Sitting on $90.8 billion as he is, there is a good argument to be had given how high this market is, that that's a vast amount of money for him to distribute versus his age. He has N time left in his life, and an incredibly sum to dispose of yet and he isn't making nearly enough progress on that front versus his standing wealth.
Between Gates & Buffett, and assuming modest growth in their current wealth levels, the Gates Foundation has to figure out how to productively distribute perhaps $250+ billion yet over 25-30 years. The target was to do so in Bill / Melinda's lifetimes, then they shifted it to within a decade or two of their passing. That's not going to happen, they have too much money and can't dispose of it fast enough.
The housing bubble wasn't subtle.
The stock market presently trading at an extremely elevated multiple is not subtle (much less while simultaneously US GDP growth is averaging historic lows, and global growth is just OK). Simply put, stocks have soared without the earnings to support the move, it's overwhelmingly multiple expansion.
It doesn't require a magic 8-ball to be prudent and lighten up after the S&P and Dow have tripled from the bottom in 8 years.