The Wall Street bronze Bull looks out to an empty Broadway in Lower Manhattan, New York, on Aug. 28, 2011, as Hurricane Irene hits the city and tri-state area with rain and high winds.
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An EU wealth tax, the “end of capitalism” in the U.S. and a major health crisis arising from obesity drugs are just some of the “outrageous predictions” put forward by Saxo Bank in a report published Tuesday.
Heading into 2024, the Danish investment bank suggested the world is at an “inflection point, with the familiar road of the last decade coming to an end.”
The predictions focus on a “series of unlikely but underappreciated” events that if they were to occur, would “send shockwaves across the financial markets.” The forecasts are not representative of the bank’s official views.
“It’s all about provoking thought processes, and what I’ve found over the last 21 years is that boards like it when they’re doing forward planning, central banks like it for the risk mitigation and I think our clients love it because it’s engaging — it’s like being at a good dinner table conversation where people are pushing against each other,” Saxo Bank Chief Investment Officer Steen Jakobsen told CNBC on Tuesday.
EU goes ‘Robin Hood’
As the European Union requires more funding for a suite of long-term policy goals, including climate change mitigation, health care, education and the war in Ukraine, Saxo Bank Head of Equity Strategy Peter Garnry suggested the bloc’s leaders could implement a 2% wealth tax.
This would be rendered more likely if the population “realises how little in tax billionaires are actually playing,” he speculated, with social unrest frequently simmering across the continent.
Citing the Global Tax Evasion Report 2024, Garnry noted that despite its vast welfare system compared to the U.S., the EU has 499 billionaires (in U.S. dollar terms) who pay the lowest personal tax in percentage of wealth compared to billionaires from North America and East…
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