investments

Walton family’s Walmart hires 200,000 furloughed staff and pauses Asda sale

Walmart, the world’s biggest family business, reached its goal of hiring 150,000 new employees by the end of May in less than a month and has pledged to hire an extra 50,000 staff as part of the US retailer’s response to the coronavirus crisis.

In this unprecedented time of high uncertainty from a sanitary and economic perspective, the different drivers at play are moving in different directions. These forces make the exercise of GDP forecasting quite tricky and not particularly helpful for the time being.

As of the writing of this article on 25 March, 2020, markets are leading the real economic cycle and therefore they will bottom before the end of the pandemic. However, they will calm down and be reassured on the path forward when they can anchor expectations on three points:

If you listen closely to leading business figures from Asia, you get a sense for their economic fears and expectations. After visiting a leadership summit in Singapore, I am ever more convinced that we will be facing a new global Cold War, which will be fought over technology dominance. Europe needs to prepare for that.

China’s billionaire business families are setting up their own family offices at a phenomenal rate as ageing principals shift their priorities from wealth creation to preservation and succession.

More than three-quarters of Chinese families surveyed by Campden Wealth said they either established or joined a family office after 2010. In the last six years, interest has been growing, and almost one-third reported they began using family office services in either 2018 (13%) or in the first eight months of 2019 (18%).