In October, Marc Sperling, the 36-year-old president of an equity-trading company, bought a new condo on the Upper West Side in a building where four-bedroom apartments like his cost more than $4 million. When he moves into the completed building next year, he plans to hold on to his other two apartments in Murray Hill and Miami Beach — each of which he values at about $2.5 million.So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the lower middle class people who bought into the housing Ponzi scheme were greedheads chasing easy money, but the people who orchestrated it, like James E. Cayne, can spend 25 million dollars on an apartment, attend parties more extravagant that Caligula could hallucinate from the depths of tertiary syphillis, attend bridge tournaments as his company precipitates a financial crisis, and keep his fucking job as Chairman while the Fed assumes the risk from all the toxic mortgage debt his firm accrued while he was CEO.
Mr. Sperling views the nation’s economic slump as a temporary problem, and is grateful that it has yet to affect him. “I think if you have the means to ride it out, that’s what you do,” he said.
His view of the subprime mortgage crisis seemed to reflect a sort of inverse class resentment.
“I don’t want to sound harsh, but the people who were buying million-dollar houses with a combined household income of $70,000 or $80,000 were the ones who were chasing easy money,” he said.
Days before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the bank’s chairman, James E. Cayne, paid $25 million for a 14th-floor condo at the Plaza Hotel.
He, too, is invited to the May 10 party at the Plaza. It will feature a dozen female string musicians made up to look like statues and clothed in dresses of fresh flowers, like roses and gardenias. There will be caviar and Cognac bars, as well as a buffet designed to visually replicate 17th-century Dutch paintings from the recent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, “The Age of Rembrandt.”
Here's the way I see it: if you're absolutely the most skilled, amazing, one of a kind person in your field, and you get paid the most ridiculous amount I could possibly condone under any circumstances, it would come out to, say $200 an hour. And that's ridiculous but I'm being generous. And if you're crazy and work 70 hours a week that's $14,000 a week. And if you work 52 weeks a year and skip out on your taxes, as any good rich person will, that's $728,000 a year. Therefore my conclusion is that it's IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to be richer than this without SOMEONE getting screwed.Or, perhaps, they've learned that there are ways to make money other than working by the hour for a large corporation.
Kristin had not slept much on the first night, even though the priests had blessed her bed. On top were spread silk-covered pillows, and linen sheet, and the finest blankets and furs, but underneath lay filthy, rotting straw; there were lice in the bedclothes and in the magnificent black bear pelt that lay on top.The people profiled in this story are a walking argument for greater progressiveness in income taxes.
... there was a loft half-filled with flax, and nothing had been done with it--it seemed to be a large part of several years' harvest. And a storeroom full of ancient, unwashed, and stinking wool, some in sacks and some lying loose all around. When Kristin put her hand into the wool, tiny brown worm eggs spilled out of it--moths and maggots had gotten into the wool.
The cattle were feeble, gaunt, scabrous, and chafed; never had she seen so many old animals in one place. ...
When she saw into what a sorry state everything had fallen and how much she would have to tend to, then the thought shot through her mind, hard and clear: if she had committed a sin to come to this place, so be it--but it was also a sin to make use of God's gifts as was done here. Shame was deserved by those who had been in charge before....
Spending data and interviews around the country show that middle- and working-class consumers are starting to switch from name brands to cheaper alternatives, to eat in instead of dining out and to fly at unusual hours to shave dollars off airfares.posted by russilwvong at 10:04 PM on April 26, 2008
Though seemingly small, the daily trade-offs they are making — more pasta and less red meat, more video rentals and fewer movie tickets — amount to an important shift in consumer behavior. ...
Burt Flickinger, a longtime retail consultant, said the last time he saw such significant changes in consumer buying patterns was the late 1970s, when runaway inflation prompted Americans to “switch from red meat to pork to poultry to pasta — then to peanut butter and jelly.”
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posted by DU at 7:42 AM on April 14, 2008