Covid, it turned out, wasn’t a re-run of the global financial crisis. No banks went to the wall, taking jobs and personal fortunes with them.
Share prices didn’t tank and spend years wheezing back to normality. There was a sharp intake of breath in early March when markets went into a tailspin, but they bounced back fast. The Nasdaq Composite enjoyed something of a Covid-related boom as investors snapped up shares in Big Tech.
The world, it turned out, went into lockdown, but not to rack and ruin.
HNWs
This strangest of years also gave high-net-worth individuals (HNWs) a rare chance to re-examine the nature of their personal and corporate wealth.
Stuck at home – whether it was an apartment, a spacious home or a $590 million yacht in the Grenadines – HNWs jumped at the chance to re-educate themselves.
They gobbled up research reports, hoovered up data and sought to solve incipient threats by turning factories into production lines for facemasks and santiser.
At a personal level, they reacted to a more chaotic world by diversifying portfolios and taking a far greater hands-on approach to their wealth, than they had in years.
Accompanying