WATCHING THE SKY FALL….Michael Shnayerson writes in Vanity Fair this month about the nouveau poore on Wall Street:
One former Lehman executive in her 40s stood in her vast clothes closet not long ago, talking to her personal stylist. On shelves around her were at least 10 designer handbags that had cost her anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 each.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I guess I’ll have to get rid of the maid.”
Why not sell a few of those bags?, the stylist thought, but didn’t say so.
“Well,” the executive said after a moment, “I guess I’ll cut her from five days a week to four.”
There’s good entertainment value here if you’re looking for a few minutes of escape and fully justified schadenfreude from today’s grim news.
On another note, it appears that one piece of fallout from the Wall Street collapse is that there are loads of huge penthouse suites available now at fire sale prices. Sadly, I won’t be moving into one of them. Aside from being a wee bit short of the circa $10 million fire sale prices, when I mentioned this to Marian the other day she told me that she wouldn’t want to live 50 stories up in the air anyway. What a drag. I think it would be great. But even if I scrape together the scratch, it looks like it will never happen. Another dream shattered.
