Greed at a Glance
Sam Pizzigati
Bonuses on Wall Street this year, a leading New York compensation consulting firm reported last Thursday, will jump an average 40 percent this year. That firm, Johnson Associates, has a simple explanation for the big boost. Explains firm managing director Alan Johnson: “As firms have gotten healthier, they pay their people more.” And what will their people be spending their new-found fortunes on? Maybe a duplex in Manhattan’s Trump Tower. You can snare one with “phone-controlled air-conditioning” for just $14,995,000. Also included in that price: a refrigerator with motorized shelves, a neat touch, says the realtor listing, sure to help you “easily accommodate your groceries.”
The upcoming year-end bonus billions on Wall Street, researchers at Bain and Company reported last week, won’t be enough to prevent a 16 percent dropoff this year in North American luxury retail. So what are luxury retailers doing? They’re looking east for new markets — in Mongolia. Louis Vuitton has just opened its first luxury outlet in Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital. Why Mongolia, a nation with an average income that runs just $1,800? Mongolia turns out to be one of the world’s newest mining hotbeds. In Mongolia, says analyst Antoine Belge from the HSBC banking giant, “the big luxury brands are targeting pockets of wealth,” in the “small communities of people that have money.”
Out of the mouths of babes — and elderly right-wingers — sometimes come gems. In Britain, the mega rich have been fulminating for months against plans to raise the UK’s top tax rate next year from 40 to 50 percent on income over £150,000, the equivalent of about $250,000. British deep pockets — ranging from insurance tycoons to actor Michael Caine — are threatening to leave the country if the tax hike actually goes into effect. But the 74-year-old business tycoon Stuart Wheeler, one of the British Conservative Party’s biggest donors, isn’t going anywhere — and can’t understand why any rich people in their right minds would. Noted Wheeler last week to the Times of London: “I think it’s pretty mad to go and live somewhere you don’t want to be, purely for tax reasons, when you have already got a lot of money.” Added Wheeler: “It seems to me that if you are pretty rich, the number one thing you would want to do with your money is use it to live in the country you want to be in.”
Deep pockets who do depart for sunnier tax climes may have to leave some of their prized possessions behind. But you can bet they won’t leave home without their Centurion, the world’s most exclusive credit card. Worldwide, says a new analysis, somewhere over 30,000 super rich carry the Centurion, a titanium-laced card from American Express that costs $5,000 to get and $2,500 a year to maintain. To qualify for a Centurion, you have to have spent at least $250,000 a year with an American Express Platinum card. Among the goodies the super rich get for carrying a Centurion: a personal concierge and a free membership with Space Adventures, the space tourism company.
Recent years have seen chronic political turmoil in Thailand, complete with blockades, violent clashes, and even a state of emergency. What’s driving all this bitter political division? A columnist for Thailand’s biggest business daily is blaming his nation’s “massively unequal distribution of wealth and power.” Households in Thailand’s most affluent fifth, Nation analyst Chang Noi noted last week, are averaging 15 to 18 times more income than bottom-fifth households, almost double the income gap in Thailand’s Asian neighbors. Thailand’s richest 0.1 percent, meanwhile, hold 40 percent of Thai bank assets. A 1994 study, adds Noi, found that Thailand’s poorest 10 percent were paying nearly twice as much of their incomes in taxes as Thailand’s rich. No one has since then done a follow-up study. The results, says Noi, would be “too embarrassing.”
