CONSPICIOUS CONSUMPTION

The contrast between the lives of many workers surviving on $1 a day and the filthy rich was well summed up by this newspaper article.
"Perhaps more than any other commodity, fine wine came to symbolise the conspicuous consumption of life BC - Before Crunch. Barely a month went by without some extravagant tale of vinous excess. Most famously there were the "Barclay Six", the bankers who ran up a £42,000 wine bill at one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, but they were examples of a decade-long phenomenon. The sheer perversity of spending so much money on something so ephemeral seemed to be the very point of such orgiastic spending. The rich could, almost literally, piss their money away. Or just spray it on the walls, which are how one bonus-fuelled investment banker disposed of £21,000 of Crystal champagne in the London club, Movida."
(Times, 19 February) RD