Tis the season for opulence, not belt-tightening.
Some entrepreneurs and investors have already started buying themselves presents — everything from Bentleys to seven-course caviar dinners and private-jet rentals.
Buyers are lining up for Bentleys starting at $174,000 (the most popular is the Continental — GT, GT Convertible and Flying Spur), says Christophe Georges, president and COO of Bentley Motors, adding sales at the end of Q3 for The Americas were 1,750 cars delivered, up 29 per cent on 2011.
In spite of the fact that there has been a disruption in New York following the hurricane, sales are coming back. “We can already say we will enjoy very strong growth,” Georges predicts.
Buyers in New York, where Diane von Furstenberg and Tommy Hilfiger are counted as clients, are mainly Wall Street bankers, entrepreneurs and Silicon Alley investors.
Meanwhile, it’s so busy at Caviar Russe that the managing director, Ilya Panchernikov, has declared November and December “caviar and champagne season.”
“This year we are seeing stronger interest. Caviar is a product that is really recession-proof,” Panchernikov says, adding that bookings for work lunches, holiday parties and private dinners are strong, as well as for seven-course dinners with 10 grams of caviar in each course. The dinners are $395 a person, $225 a person extra for champagne pairings.
Recently a customer spent $17,000 on a dinner for two at the restaurant. Orders range from $95 to a few thousand.
At Pierre Michel salon, gift certificates for mink eyelashes for women (mink hairs applied individually) are flying off the shelves at $500 a pop, plus $150 for lash maintenance. They last two to three months. Monika Crouch, the lashes specialist there, has 600 clients.
Wheeler-dealers are also buying Magellan Jets holiday gift cards, starting at $7,700. A 10-hour Hawker 400XP option for $43,500 is selling “extremely well amongst New Yorkers,” a spokeswoman said. “New Yorkers are the biggest customer base for Magellan.”
About 70 percent of its customers fly in or out of New York.–Julie Earle-Levine
Hats off to Mary
Mary Schapiro has a big fan club at independent agency brokerage firm Themis Trading.
Last week, Themis issued a breathless note to its clients, praising Schapiro as she steps down as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission Dec. 14.
While Schapiro has taken plenty of heat from critics during her tenure, Themis has rushed to her defense, saying her efforts to clean up the markets will be her legacy.
Themis itself has taken issue with high-frequency traders, whom it accuses of fragmenting and damaging the markets, a view encapsulated in its new book, “Broken Markets: How High-Frequency Trading and Predatory Practices on Wall Street Are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio.”
Schapiro inherited this “bag of crap,” when she took the top job at the SEC in 2009, Themis partners and controversial authors Joe Saluzzi and Sal Arnuk wrote.
Themis says Wall Street’s top cop deserves credit for stock circuit breakers, banning such esoteric phenomena as “stub” quotes and “naked access,” and for record insider-trading enforcement.
“There is no shortage of pundits critical of her job at the SEC, but perhaps they would do better to direct their outrage at the system/machine of politics and lobbyists that has infiltrated all aspects of Washington DC, including the SEC,” Saluzzi and Arnuk wrote. “So stop hatin’ on Mary!” –John Aidan Byrne
A toast to Skoll
When ex-eBay president Jeff Skoll founded film production company Participant — aimed at making entertainment promoting social change — skeptics scoffed that he would be the latest billionaire to be fleeced by Hollywood.
But eight years later, Participant has produced a string of hit movies, including “The Help,” “Contagion,” “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and, most recently, “Lincoln.”
“[That string] kind of proves that you can do an issue-oriented film as long as it’s entertaining,” Skoll told On the Money at last week’s Gotham Independent Film Awards, where he received a career tribute, along with Matt Damon, David O. Russell and Marion Cotillard.
The Gotham ceremony could just be the first stop for Skoll and Co. on the awards circuit; “Lincoln” and the fracking film “Promised Land,” set to be released at the very end of the year, are both Oscar hopefuls. –Hilary Lewis