{"id":204558,"date":"2020-03-27T07:26:36","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T07:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=204558"},"modified":"2020-03-29T08:00:32","modified_gmt":"2020-03-29T08:00:32","slug":"how-the-rich-stay-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=204558","title":{"rendered":"How the rich stay rich"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\">Jeff Bezos and other top executives offloaded shares just in time before the pandemic slashed company values, saving them billions<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><strong>Executives at top US traded companies sold around $9.2 billion in shares of their own companies between the start of February and the end of last week<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><strong>This saved the executives around $1.9 billion, as the S&amp;P 500 stock index plunged about 30% between February 19 and March 20<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><strong>Amazon boss Jeff Bezos was by far the biggest seller, offloading $3.4 billion in shares in the first week of February, saving a staggering $317 million\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><strong>More than 150 top bosses who sold at least $1 million worth of stock in February and March had not sold any stock in the last 12 months\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><strong>There is no suggestion that the sales was done due to information about coronavirus but the sales dwarfed those in the same period in 2019<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><strong>A number of US senators were exposed last week after they appeared to offload stock while reassuring the public everything was under control<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><strong>Ordinary workers have been less lucky, with many losing their jobs overnight and more than 37 million jobs at risk <\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/health\/article-8118911\/Who-ask-help-coronavirus-symptoms-strike.html\">Coronavirus symptoms<\/a>: what are they and should you see a doctor?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">Rachel Sharp \u2013 Daily Mail March 24, 2020<\/h1>\n<div id=\"attachment_148351\" style=\"width: 370px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/jeff-bezos-01-500.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-148351\" class=\"wp-image-148351\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/jeff-bezos-01-500.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"360\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-148351\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jeff Bezos, who is currently the richest person in the world worth an estimated $98.6 billion. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Jeff Bezos and other top executives offloaded shares just in time before the <a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/coronavirus\/index.html\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">coronavirus<\/span><\/strong><\/a> pandemic slashed their company values, saving themselves billions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Executives at top US traded companies sold around $9.2 billion in shares of their own companies between the start of February and the end of last week, analysis from the\u00a0<a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/bezos-other-corporate-executives-sold-shares-just-in-time-11585042204\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Wall Street Journal <\/span><\/strong><\/a>has revealed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">The quick move to offload shares looks to have saved the executives &#8211; who are already among the richest people in the country &#8211; billions, as they ditched them just in the nick of time before the markets plummeted.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">The analysis estimates that the sales prevented the top bosses losing around $1.9 billion between them,\u00a0as the S&amp;P 500 stock index plunged about 30% between February 19 and March 20.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Amazon boss Jeff Bezos was by far the biggest seller, offloading $3.4 billion in shares in the first week of February, saving him a staggering $317 million than if he had kept the stock through to March 20.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">It also saw the billionaire sell as much stock in that one week as he has in the last year, the Journal reported.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">The sale accounted for around 3% of Bezos&#8217;s total Amazon shares, and made up over a third of all stock exchange sales during this timeframe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Laurence Fink, CEO of BlackRock, also acted to offload stock as the US geared up for the coronavirus to reach new heights, selling $25 million of his company shares on February 14, saving himself potential losses of more than $9.3 million.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">A spokesperson for BlackRock told the Journal his sales were a small percentage of his holdings and that he had sold a similar amount of stock the same time in 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">The boss of IHS Markit, Lance Uggla, also sold $47 million of his shares around February 19, which would by now have plummeted by $19.2 million.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-8148745\/Top-executives-offloaded-shares-just-time-pandemic-slashed-company-values.html\">Continues \u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Bezos and other top executives offloaded shares just before the pandemic slashed company values, saving them billions. Were they warned?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Current_Affairs","category-Economics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=204558"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204610,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204558\/revisions\/204610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=204558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=204558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=204558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}