Before Jerome Powell took the podium on Wednesday, stocks were approaching their highest levels in six weeks, fueling a rebound in the fortunes of some of the world’s richest people after a brutal year.
Just as he did in August during an eight-minute speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, however, the Federal Reserve chair talked tough on inflation, squashing investor hopes of a decisive pivot away from tightening monetary policy and knocking stocks to the lowest in more than a week.
In the span of that hour-and-a-half from when Powell started speaking to the US stock market close, the top 500 people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index lost about US$59 billion ($83.37 billion) on their public holdings.
