Apple Was Worth More Than All The Banks In Europe Earlier Today

You might think the financial climate in America is bad now that we’ve had our credit downgraded by S&P, but we’re in good shape compared to Europe, where EU ministers have spent much of the past year playing whack-a-mole with member nations credit problems. In fact, all it will take by many estimates is one European country to default on its debt for the whole Eurozone to collapse.

Here’s how dire it is. For a brief spell earlier this afternoon, Apple was worth more than all 32 of the biggest Eurozone banks… combined.

The banks have bounced back since then, but by any estimate, Europe is in trouble. The index has declined by a third since July due to fears that the banks will lose billions if the Euro goes under due to their holdings of government bonds.

Meanwhile, Apple’s going strong. Not only is it in the process of replacing Exxon as the world’s most valuable company, but Apple has more cash on hand than the GDPs of 2/3rds of the world’s countries.

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.