Wealthy barber: Meet wealthy bag lady.
Not just any bag lady, mind you, we're talking about the one who totes around a Hermès Birkin handbag. Named after English actress Jane Birkin, they're likely the most exclusive handbag in the world, carrying a price tag of $60,000 (U.S.).
So, if you're looking for a long-term investment, you might want to forget the stock market, skip the gold, and buy yourself a Birkin.
They're so in demand that there's a waiting list, but if you just can't wait, you can try picking one up at auction, if you don't mind paying in the region of $223,000, as one buyer did last summer.
You wouldn't just be buying a ludicrously overpriced status symbol, you'd also be making a canny investment, according to research done by Baghunter, an online dealer in bags by top designers.
Its study looks at the 35-year period between 1980 and 2015, and compared with the performance of the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, gold, and the Birkin bag (which didn't actually make its debut till 1981), as Quartz reports. While the U.S. benchmark stock index had a nominal average return of 11.66 per cent a year, and gold a miserly 1.5 per cent, the value of a Birkin bag increased 14.2 per cent a year.
If a $60,000 bag is a little rich for you, you could have invested in its maker instead. In the past five years, Hermès stock has increased 120 per cent; to get a little perspective, in the same time period, Royal Bank of Canada shares (excluding dividends) have grown 5 per cent.
The moral? Splurge big time on luxury goods; they could turn out to be your retirement fund.
Name that CEO
Speaking of Royal Bank of Canada, who's its chief executive officer? Don't know? Okay, Disclosures will lob an easy one at you – who's the CEO of BlackBerry? No? Microsoft? Jeez, how about naming the CEO of any company, anywhere? Oh, come on, you're pathetic.
But if you're zero-for-three, you're in the majority, according to a survey from public relations giant Edelman, which found that 58 per cent of Canadians were unable to name a single CEO. That compares with an average of 47 per cent among the 28 countries studied, so Canadians clearly need to get with the program.
The online survey conducted last month also found that South Koreans and Indians were the most CEO savvy, at 12 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively, while the Dutch and the Brits were the most clued out, at 71 per cent at 68 per cent, respectively.
When it comes to trust in companies headquartered in each country, Mexicans were the most jaded, at 28 per cent. And the most trusting? Hold your head high: Leading the 17 developed nations surveyed, almost two-thirds of Canadians (and Swedes) put their faith in domestically based companies.
Hmmm … maybe the rest of the world knows something we don't.
Dumb and dumber
Sure, you're more than a little ticked off when a bank turns down your loan application, but you have to look at it from their point of view: They have a responsibility to their shareholders to ensure any borrower is able to make good on their loan – it's called due diligence.
Such risk assessment seemed to be sorely lacking at five big global banks, which have seen £120-million ($244-million) go up in smoke after a little-known London-based bond trading brokerage called Invexstar Capital Management went belly up, as Bloomberg reports. The firm's manager, Alberto Statti, also happened to be its only employee. (A situation commonly referred to as a "red flag.")
Before he ran Invexstar, Mr. Statti ran two firms (into the ground), with one failing in 2008 with losses of £54-million, and the other going bust in 2013, with approximately £12-million owed to creditors, among them JPMorgan Chase, according to Bloomberg.
Mr. Statti looks to have gone for broke, literally, with his third investment vehicle, as Invexstar racked up losses of £120-million, leaving on the hook banks such as France's BNP Paribas, Japan's Nomura Holdings, and U.S.-based Morgan Stanley.
"I'm blown away by the whole thing, London-based banking analyst Christopher Wheeler told Bloomberg. "The desire to boost revenues and turnover in the fixed-income business perhaps blurred and clouded judgments." You think?
Enrico Danieletto of hedge fund Pairstech Capital Management, who shared an office with him in 2011, said "he was a very funny and colourful guy." His creditor banks probably don't think he's such as riot.
Consumers looking a bit peaky
Have we hit peak everything? That's what one IKEA executive thinks.
"In the West, we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I'd say we've hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff … peak home furnishings," Steve Howard, told a Guardian conference in London last week.
There's still a debate over whether we've hit peak oil (but a pretty strong consensus that we've reached peak beard – so long, lumbersexuals). But Mr. Howard believes retailers in the West have hit the wall.
The company's head of sustainability – a job title that's a little rich for a retailer that can probably boast the fastest purchase-to-landfill time frame of any furniture maker – says the flat-packing chain is now looking to the developing world to expand its footprint, Quartz reported. So the world clearly hasn't seen peak IKEA yet.
Because girls like pink
The aforementioned lumbersexual is supposed to be a dying breed, but there's a new wrinkle that may keep the trend going a little longer.
South of the border, in Wisconsin, of all places, legislation has been drawn up and awaits the John Hancock of Governor Scott Walker, Reuters reports.
Currently, state law requires hunters to wear bright orange hats, jackets, and jumpsuits, in the name of safety. But in order to encourage more women to kill animals, Assembly Bill 291 "provides that the highly visible colour also may be the colour commonly referred to as bright pink or fluorescent pink." (Disclosures realizes this sounds like we're making it up, but honestly, we're not.)
And according to the International Hunter Education Association, Arkansas allows their hunters to wear fluorescent chartreuse. (We're not making this one up, either.)
The next state hunting bill up for consideration is in Wyoming, which would expand the palette of allowable hunting garb to include vivid fuchsia. (Okay, so Disclosures is making that one up.)
Still, it's nice to know that the traditionally male hunting world is showing such consideration for women. Because – as Justin Trudeau would say – it's 2016.