Greed at a Glance
A weekly update on avarice in America and beyond

November 20, 2006

Versace, the world-famous Italian fashion house, is ditching its lame effort to make waves in global mass marketing and returning to its roots — with the awesomely affluent. The company last week announced plans to ring the world with 15 “seven-star hotels.”  The first, in Dubai, will offer guests “a swimming pool with live exotic fish and specially cooled sand.” The new hotel chain will complement the fashion giant’s recent entry into what Reuters calls the “super luxury market for refurbishing yachts and private jets.” Versace, since unveiling this new service earlier this year, has refurbished two jets and three yachts — all at over $10.2 million each. Observes Versace CEO Giancarlo Di Risio: “There is a large group of very wealthy people scattered around the world.”

Some things in our world just can’t happen. Water can’t flow uphill, and a great CEO can’t ever be overpaid. Or so Wall Street power attorney Martin Lipton seemed to be arguing last week at an Investment Banking Summit in New York City. The $187.5 million the New York Stock Exchange handed Richard Grasso? Lipton’s take: “I can't think of anybody who did more for the company or institution that he headed than Dick Grasso.” The $295 million that Barry Diller pulled in last year from IAC/InterActiveCorp? Well deserved, since only a company that “prospered” could “have created that compensation.” Summed up Lipton, a legend in merger-and-acquisitions circles and now the clear front-runner for 2006 corporate apologist-of-the-year honors: “It’s ridiculous to think that someone who creates a great company isn’t entitled to having been superbly well compensated.”

The 2004 Athens Olympics now history, Greece’s economy doesn’t have much going for it these days — except gorgeous islands, thousands of them all sitting well within Greece’s territorial waters. The Greek government’s Archeological Agency used to routinely block sales of this historic real estate. But government officials are now welcoming deep-pocketed foreigners looking for their own private piece of paradise. Among the isles now on the market: Makri, a less than a square-mile speck that Homer talked up in the Iliad, and the five islets of the Echinades complex in the Ionian Sea. The complex, also less than a square mile in total surface area, figures to fetch at least $12.8 million . . .

Time, the old adage goes, is money. Maybe that’s why the latest “super cars” in the world’s priciest auto showrooms are upping the speed ante. The 2006 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, starting at $255,000, can hurtle from zero to 62 mph in 3.7 seconds. But lay down just $319,000 for the newest Lamborghini, the Murciélago LP640, and you can slice the time to 62 down to 3.4 seconds. The pace of your daily grind demand even more get-up-and-go? The Bugatti Veyron can hit 62 in a mere 2.5 seconds. The price? Anywhere between $1 million and $1.4 million, depending on options. Sales revenue from these and other ultra-luxury models, Business Week estimated last week, will reach $6 billion by 2010 . . .

Back in the 19th century, notes City University of New York sociologist Frances Fox Piven, the original giants of sociology directed society’s attention to “the new patterns of inequality, hardship and disorganization” then afflicting the industrializing world. Piven, the current president of the American Sociological Association, will be devoting next year’s annual ASA meeting to that same mission. Notes that meeting’s theme: “In the United States, inequalities of income and wealth are increasing while our electoral system is degraded by money corruption, spectacle and propaganda,” creating, in the process, “policies that violate axiomatic sociological knowledge about social cohesion and stability.” Piven herself first gained national recognition, as a perceptive and provocative analyst of inequality, in the early 1970s.

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