It’s been a tough week for Bill Gates. According to the Forbes annual billionaires list, he has been overtaken as the richest man in the world by his friend Warren Buffett, who is now worth 62 billion Dollars. Gates made only a paltry 2 billion Dollars last year.
Elsewhere, many would like to have such a problem. The slew of bad news continues both at home and abroad.
Rising fuel and food costs, along with tighter borrowing conditions are hitting consumers hard in the UK. This has pushed the Consumer Confidence Index to its lowest level since the survey began.
A report from the Confederation of British Industry and Grant Thornton that said levels of business volumes and values in the service sector were rated ‘well below normal’.
Firms providing services to consumers, such as hotels, bars, restaurants, cinemas and gyms, were particularly pessimistic about the general business situation, with the steepest fall in optimism since November 2001.
And the result of all that was another week, another all-time low for the Pound against the Euro.
At nearly 77p to the Euro a café au lait and a croissant in a small French village don’t seem nearly as attractive. Britons with second homes aboard are facing a grim year, with the value of property across Europe likely to fall as the long-running continental housing boom finally runs out of steam, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors warns.
The good news is that for those returning to the UK, the rises in continental property prices combined with the strength of the Euro will net a tidy profit when converting back into Sterling, and 4X’s new forward buying service means customers can lock in the current rate against future weakening of the Euro.
However the troubles in the European housing market pale into insignificance compared to America.
The number of US home repossessions, and the speed at which they were being repossessed, hit record levels in the fourth quarter of 2007, figures from the Mortgage Bankers Association showed on Thursday.
Separate data from the Federal Reserve showed that the amount of equity Americans have in their homes has dropped below 50% for the first time since 1945.
Added to this, the Dollar has plunged to new low after new low, making Asian goods, where the economies rely heavily on exports to the US, relatively expensive and tipping all the stockmarkets around the globe into huge falls.
The net result is the old adage – "when America sneezes the whole world catches a cold". Whether it will turn into pneumonia remains to be seen.
However, amidst all the gloom, it’s good to know that there is a ray of light, and some people are benefiting from the weak US Dollar. 
The relative strength of the Euro against the Dollar saw the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt, of French cosmetic’s company L’Oreal, reach 22.9 billion Dollars last year and turn her into the richest woman in the world. Is that fair? Oh I think so.
All together now – because she’s worth it!
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