utenzi

I was glancing over the last issue of Forbes (dated April 27, 2009) before tossing it and thought I'd mention a small article on page 32 titled "Wall Street's Highest Earners." Lots of empty headed commentators, many of which seem to work for CNN, have been talking about how everyone on Wall Street is losing money. Well, that would be news to the 10 men listed in the Forbes article. #10, David Harding, no doubt was embarrassed by only making $290,000,000 last year but the rest of us would have been pleased as punch by that much moola. And yes, that is 290 MILLION. Number one on the list made almost 10 times more. James Simons "earned" $2.8 billion (yes, with a B) running the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund. Part of that was from fees (for example, his Medallion Fund charges 44% of profits + 5% of assets) and part was from his equity stake in the fund. That's a pretty decent paycheck in a year that most people lost money. No real surprise that his big...

Forbes Magazine publishes a supplement a few times a year called Forbes Life. It can be an interesting read in as far as it is an observation of a lifestyle very few of us will ever experience. We're talking about some seriously conspicuous consumption here. These are people who plop down thousands for a pair of shoes, hundreds for a couple of pairs of socks to go with the shoes and 20 grand to pop over to the little village in Italy to watch the cobbler put the shoes together in his quaint little shop. Nice, huh? One of the articles in this issue (April 2009) is about how simple things are back in fashion due to the hard economic times we're enduring. The article suggests taking off those fancy blocky watches and replace them with a more simple enduring look. But while they might be simple, they're not cheap. Of the 11 watches profiled in the article the cheapest was the watch over there on the left, a Jaeger-Lecoultre Master Ultra Thin with lists at $6,850. Most of the o...