One of the largest and most talked about takeovers of 2022 has finally been completed. Elon Musk is officially the owner of Twitter, making Twitter a private company as of October 27th, 2022. This means Twitter will not have to publish quarterly or annual reports anymore, and that Musk will be able to decide the path of Twitter by himself. He plans to change the company entirely, firing four members of Twitter’s former board. Also, he expects to expand the number of Twitter users from 200 million to 930 million by 2028. Furthermore, he wants to open the dialog on Twitter by allowing controversial people back on the platform and not suspending accounts anymore.
Good news for the UK, they have a new prime minister! Rishi Sunak has major plans for the British economy. As many people know, the British economy is not doing great, their GDP, production and consumption are lagging compared to the rest of Europe. Sunak wants to close the British budget gap, but he has not yet announced how he will achieve this. Most likely tax rates will rise, and the spending will be cut. His main task is to restore the faith in the economy since his predecessor had some radical tax breaks - due to which the pound reached a record low. During last week the FTSE100, an important measure for the British market, increased with 0.65%.
Finally, the markets, the past week, the outlooks of the US markets were positive with the S&P500 rising with 3.70%, the Dow Jones increasing with 5.37% and the NASDAQ increasing with 2.17%. This appears to be due to news about a growing GDP and the earnings season beating the investor expectations. This movement is, however, not expected to last for a long time, as the Fed is taking measures by increasing the interest rates with 75 basis points and home prices are falling which is expected to lower consumption leading to economic slowdown. The European markets are also looking positive with the EUROSTOXX 600 increasing with 3.09%. However, experts expect that the resilience of the European markets won’t keep up for much longer and that the positive outlooks and assumptions will change in early 2023.
This week the competition will start. I hope to have given you some insight in the current market conditions and events so that you can take these into account for your first proposals of the year!