The Phantom Billionaire Who’s Richer Than Warren Buffett
A practically unheard-of billionaire, Amancio Ortega, just blew past household name Warren Buffett to be the second-richest man in the world, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is worth $85.5 billion, remains first.
Oretega, who has amassed a net worth of $71.5 billion, is the founding chairman of the Inditex fashion group, the world’s largest apparel retailer. Inditex is best known for its chain of Zara clothing and accessories shops, which had sales of $19.7 billion in fiscal 2014.
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Worth noting is that Warren Buffett, whose net worth of $70.2 billion puts him at third place, would be in second-place if not for his philanthropic giving.
A native of Spain, Ortega refuses almost all interview requests and until 1999, no photograph of him had ever been published. However, Zara is not so low-profile. The world’s biggest fashion retailer operates over 6,600 stores in more than 88 countries.
Inditex has shown strong growth year over year. In March, it reported net profit up 5 percent from the previous fiscal year. In addition, the company said it planned to open up 480 more stores this year.
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Key to Ortega’s success has been keeping Zara’s manufacturing close to its home base in the ancient port city of La Coruña, rather than outsourcing production to China to cut costs. This allows Zara to act quickly on new trends and put new products into stories right away. Zara shops receive new shipments of clothing twice a week, virtually unheard of among retail stores.
If Inditex brands continue to grow and Zara’s popularity extends to millennials and beyond, the mysterious billionaire’s wealth could eventually push him to number one on the list.
Chart of the Day: Boosting Corporate Tax Revenues
The leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have all proposed increasing taxes on corporations, including raising income tax rates to levels ranging from 25% to 35%, up from the current 21% imposed by the Republican tax cuts in 2017. With Bernie Sanders leading the way at $3.9 trillion, here’s how much revenue the higher proposed corporate taxes, along with additional proposed surtaxes and reduced tax breaks, would generate over a decade, according to calculations by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, highlighted Wednesday by Bloomberg News.
Chart of the Day: Discretionary Spending Droops
The federal government’s total non-defense discretionary spending – which covers everything from education and national parks to veterans’ medical care and low-income housing assistance – equals 3.2% of GDP in 2020, near historic lows going back to 1962, according to an analysis this week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Chart of the Week: Trump Adds $4.7 Trillion in Debt
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated this week that President Trump has now signed legislation that will add a total of $4.7 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2029. Tax cuts and spending increases account for similar portions of the projected increase, though if the individual tax cuts in the 2017 Republican overhaul are extended beyond their current expiration date at the end of 2025, they would add another $1 trillion in debt through 2029.
Chart of the Day: The Long Decline in Interest Rates
Are interest rates destined to move higher, increasing the cost of private and public debt? While many experts believe that higher rates are all but inevitable, historian Paul Schmelzing argues that today’s low-interest environment is consistent with a long-term trend stretching back 600 years.
The chart “shows a clear historical downtrend, with rates falling about 1% every 60 years to near zero today,” says Bloomberg’s Aaron Brown. “Rates do tend to revert to a mean, but that mean seems to be declining.”
Chart of the Day: Drug Price Plans Compared
Lawmakers are considering three separate bills that are intended to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Here’s an overview of the proposals, from a series of charts produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation this week. An interesting detail highlighted in another chart: 88% of voters – including 92% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans – want to give the government the power to negotiate prices with drug companies.
