(1) Most money exists as credit and has no tangible existence.
(2) In the original, it was actually a $10,000 note, but the point should be taken.
(3) Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he and his wife have become the world’s largest individual donors to charitable causes. Other super-rich “geeks” have followed in his footsteps.
(4) According to a National Audit Office Press Notice dated 16 December 1998, (downloaded from the Internet and quoted verbatim): “The Department of Transport sold Railtrack on 20 May 1996 through a stock market flotation. The Department sold all the shares in Railtrack at a price of 3.90 each, raising equity proceeds of 1.9 billion (and gross proceeds of equity and new debt of some 2.5 billion). This was the largest single sale by value in the privatisation of the railways. After the first day of trading the shares traded within a range of 4.05 to 4.30 until late July 1996. Since then Railtracks share price has risen markedly. At 30 October 1998 the share price was 16.05, giving Railtracks equity a market value of some 8 billion.”
(5) Writing in the newsgroup uk.transport.london on May 10, 2002, Aidan Stanger commented “You’re wrong, they didn’t. They got their money back through dividends, and those who bought their shares at the time of issue made huge profits (IIRC dividends paid were [several] times the original share price). But even those who bought their shares when the company was heading for the wall (which would have happened without Byers’s intervention, as the company’s incompetent directors had paid out so much in dividends that there wasn’t enough left to meet their financial commitments) will still get most of their money back.”
Whether or not this is true the fact remains that many people have lost enormous sums of money; any compensation paid eventually will come from the taxpayer, ie the man and woman in the street.
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