Frugality Is So Fatiguing

The Obama administration-now in frantic populist make-up mode-may be pondering beefed-up regulation of the banking industry, but the titans of Wall Street finance are plainly in no mood to be fenced in. Not only did investors pull a major funk last week, putatively thanks to their skittishness over the White House’s antibanking posturing, but Manhattan’s monied class is primed to get frisky once more in the luxe consumer marketplace, according to New York Times Sunday Styles correspondent Laura M. Holson. It’s bonus season, and for all the high dudgeon finance moguls affect to feel over their D.C. victimhood, their generous federal bailouts have put them back decisively in the pink (if not the black, strictly speaking); Morgan Stanley plans to reward its employees with average (which means, highly top-skewed) annual bonuses of $235,000, while Goldman Sachs plans to kick in on a $489,000-per-employee basis.

However, the de facto motto for this round of bonus binging appears to be “but softly.” The lesson that the power elite took away from last year’s allegedly endemic populist rancor was the prospect that “mobs with torches would descend on their gated estates.” So as bonus-flush bankers pour forth into the Hamptons real-estate, market, say, they move with the reticent mien of an abashed adult-cinema patron in the Times Square of old.

“Don’t ask him to talk about it, because he won’t,” says Diane Saatchi, an agent with Saunders and Associates, about a bank executive who just coughed up $4.9 million for a Hamptons spread. “They don’t want anyone to know they’re buying”-including, it seems, the banker’s own extended family, since he “is worried they will ask him for money.”

That disclaimer serves as a not-so-subtle reminder that much more is at play here than populist outrage-what propels our lords of finance to reward their labors so lavishly is something that a less jaundiced outlet than Sunday Styles might call indecent greed, to the plain exclusion of our culture’s supposed noble fealty to kin and kith. You pick up the same unseemly undercurrent of licentious gelt-lust in the testimony of an unnamed banker’s wife, who huffs from one side of her mouth that “Everybody wants someone to blame and rich people are an easy target,” while enthusing from the other that “it is a good time to buy” in the vacation-home market, since distressed sellers abound; she points approvingly to a financial-executive chum who picked up a sweet Vermont haven in a pre-foreclosure fire sale.

One wishes that Holson, or better yet a trained psychological professional, could take this confused soul aside to explain that the reason rich people make for an “easy target” in the present climate is that they seem to be missing the compassion gene-the small inner voice that might suggest that it’s not right to exult in profiting from others’ misfortune, particularly when the industry you run had a direct hand in making that misfortune happen.

Still, Manahattan’s sizable high-end retail sector relies on the guiltless circulation of just this brand of pelf, so its lead merchants have some pointers for skittish finance moguls experimenting with discretion for the first time. Saks Fifth Avenue general manager Suzanne Johnson, for instance, points to one banker who came in with his wife a month ago to size up a $5,000 pair of earrings-only to have the banker come in solo recently to scoop them up. This, Johnson, suggests is a case study in time-delayed indulgence: “They are turning ‘looking’ into an ‘impulse buy.’ It is about inner self-gratification rather than letting people know how rich you are.”

That’s making a great deal, it seems to me, out of what might simply be a disorganized or overscheduled pair of turbo-shoppers. Besides, it’s far from clear how the pricey baubles in question showcase “inner self-gratification”-unless, say, one were to earmark them only to be worn on special yoga-spa getaways.

Still, however tortured the rationales may be, Saks is clearly hellbent on packaging luxe consumer junkets more or less on the downlow-next month, for example, Johnson says the store is hosting an event at its Kiton’s men’s boutique timed to bonus season that will market made-to-order suits, which can run north of $20,000. The idea, she says, is to capitalize-discreetly-on the collective impatience with “frugal fatigue” among the pecuniary elite.

Of course, “frugal fatigue” remains a luxury unto itself, in an economy that’s placed finance bailouts well ahead of anything resembling an industrial policy or viable long-term job growth; my own household, for instance, is perilously close to “no income” status.

So forgive me my little recherche neo-populist outbursts-and for the suggestion that if these abashed Wall Street plutocrats really want some inner self-gratification, they could always park a big chunk of their bonuses in Haiti. Or Detroit. (If nothing else, that way they can rest assured that their families are unlikely to get their hands on their dosh there, either.) The most efficient way to disaccumulate your surplus income without dread public stigmas, after all, is to try to get out of the habit of buying shit that provides an objective basis for social embarrassment.

Chris Lehmann would be content with a hand-up.