{"id":1590,"date":"2006-08-31T16:40:56","date_gmt":"2006-08-31T20:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1590"},"modified":"2007-10-24T14:43:29","modified_gmt":"2007-10-24T19:43:29","slug":"planning-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1590","title":{"rendered":"Planning Ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Inside the Billionaire Service Industry” by Sheelah Kolhatkar<\/a><\/p>\n

The gap between the rich and the poor has been growing wider for some time, but the really rich have now achieved escape velocity. They have far more money than ever before\u2014and a mind-boggling number of decisions to make about spending it. The \u201cultrarich”\u2014loosely defined as those with investable assets of more than $30 million\u2014often lead tremendously complicated lives. There are approximately 30,000 such people based in the United States, and nearly 50,000 elsewhere in the world, according to Capgemini and Merrill Lynch\u2019s World Wealth Report of 2005. They are the aristocracy of a new Gilded Age\u2014and providing services to them has turned into a gold rush.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The ending is a killer. Natasha Pearl is a “lifestyle consultant” who serves the “really<\/em> rich.”<\/p>\n

Then, out of the blue during one of our later conversations, Natasha Pearl said something surprising: \u201cIf the income inequality persists, we could end up with real armed camps, like in South Africa.\u201d She said she was increasingly aware of the tension between the \u201chaves\u201d and the \u201chave-nots,\u201d and she described a surge in demand among the ultrarich for real estate in out-of-the-way places such as New Zealand and rural Argentina\u2014expensive insurance policies in case things go haywire for some reason at home. \u201cThe wise ones are thinking about it now,\u201d Pearl said. Indeed, it might be worth planning ahead; I wonder what the going salary will be for a spot in an oligarch\u2019s private army.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“The Power of the Rich” by William K. Tabb<\/a><\/p>\n

Once in office elected officials tend to get far richer than they were when they entered politics. They are cut in on various deals. They become unusually successful investors. Empirical investigation reveals that in any given year between 1993 and 1998 senators who played the stock market did remarkably well. It turns out they were prescient in anticipating the market’s movements up and down, purchasing a particular stock before it took off like a rocket and dumping stocks just in time. Consider a landmark study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, which took eight years to complete because there was no data base from which the scholars could work and they had to develop one, gathering and examining data manually. They found that the stock portfolios of a random group composed of tens of thousands of households underperformed the market as a whole by 1.4 percent annually. Corporate insiders beat the market by 6 percent. But the senators (including their spouses and children) beat the market by 12 percent a year.3 The study reminds one of the findings of U.S. Senate Banking Committee counsel Ferdinand Pecora who in 1933 exposed how J. P. Morgan had reserved shares for certain clients – FDR’s secretary of the treasury, the chairmen of both the Republican and Democratic National Committees, and others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Inside the Billionaire Service Industry” by Sheelah Kolhatkar The gap between the rich and the poor has been growing wider for some time, but the really rich have now achieved escape velocity. They have far more money than ever before\u2014and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-pE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}