But it wasn’t a car or a diamond necklace or a house that made me realize that perhaps the ultra rich have become a bit tone deaf; it was a watch — or a “timepiece,” as the brochure describes them. In an advertisement in last week’s New York Times, I saw a picture of the Greubel Forsey GF05. As the picture showed, it’s a busy little number in platinum and black. A quick Google search revealed a selling price of $549,000.
I half expected to see a tagline that read “For when you need to tell the time, but you just can’t do it without spending the equivalent of 36 years of minimum wage salary.” A timepiece that costs almost triple the U.S.’s median existing-home price ($201,700) does seem a tad pricey to us peasants.
Not too long ago, in the latter days of the financial crisis and the early part of the slow and painful economic recovery, conspicuous consumption became a bit of an embarrassment. The world had sidled up to the abyss, peered over. That look into eternal darkness seems to have chided some of the wasteful spending of the 0.01 percent. Ultra-lux goods saw sales plummet. It almost seemed that people began to reassess their lives and priorities.
Just kidding, that was an image issue. The stock-market rally of almost 200 percent since then has emboldened the biggest of the big spenders to return to their profligate ways. And who can blame them, now that the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds has reported the total household net worth of the U.S. is now $81.8 trillion dollars.
That is a lot of expensive cars, houses and watches. We have money to burn, apparently — and we are.
What does the spending with reckless abandon actually mean? Are we back to business as usual in America in the midst of the fifth year of recovery since the crisis? Does frivolity with enormous sums of money represent the sort of mania we only see at bubble tops?
I have no idea. But it certainly makes me a bit nervous to see the very, very wealthy party like it’s 1999. Like the VIX, the Shiller cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio and venture-capital investing, the spending habits of the 0.01 percent are a data series worth watching.
“The ultra rich have become a bit tone deaf?” Seriously? A bit tone deaf is all? “But it certainly makes me a bit nervous?” What makes you a bit nervous Barry? The fact that the 99% have had about all that they can stand from the oligarchy (1%)? That should send a thrill up your leg Barry. Unless you’re part of the 1% of course.
Sad to say, there’s no listing of all the nifty features that come along
with this marvelous multi-tasking, six-dials-in-one, timepiece.
I bet that there are billions of cell phones in the world, selling for a thousandth of the price or less, that have more informational capabilility (beyond their basic use as a phone) than this $549,000 bauble.
But maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe its price tag is its main feature, verifying and quantifying its status as a status symbol and as a coup of conspicuous consumption.
One thing for certain, it sure is ugly.
I wonder if Mitt Romney has one.