If there was a silver lining in the financial crisis it was the Blingsheviks–the billionaire Russians who could be counted on to overpay and flash their cash even as the rest of the world crashed.
They bought big real-estate spreads in the U.S. and Europe, built the biggest yachts, hosted the most expensive parties and scooped [...]

A year ago, Wealth Report readers told me how much money it took to be considered “rich” in their town. The answers ranged from a $500,000 income in Manhattan to $1 million to $2 million in total net worth in Kansas City.
The point, of course, is that wealth is relative. Being “rich” depends on where [...]

It is not all that long ago that the big credit crunch banks were being lambasted in some quarters for their plans to invest heavily in Chinese banks, and that at least one pundit was predicting “The Coming Collapse of China”. How things change! Now it is the titans of Wall Street and the City [...]

For the past year, I have been predicting (wrongly) that the art market will correct. It defied the financial odds in part because the crisis hadn’t reached the super-rich and because a fresh wave of oligarchs and Middle Eastern sheiks hoisted their bidding paddles to save the day.

Gerhard Richter’s “Claudius” displayed at Christie’s auction house [...]

In 2006, a wealthy divorcee in Palm Beach, Fla., called me to complain about jewelry prices.
The purchase price wasn’t the problem–her husband bought it all. Her trouble was with re-sale prices.
Over the course of their roughly 10-year marriage, her husband had paid about $1.7 million for her collection of precious-stone necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings. [...]

Neil Hickman, with wife Michelle and their children Lewis (6) Lauren (11) and Holly (10), moved here from the UK for a better life but have lost their life savings after investment company failures. Photo / Martin Sykes
Good job: Naturally, raise enough doubt to have the contracts set aside as unenforceable because they were based [...]

Economists and others weigh in on the jump in claims for unemployment benefits last week.
While we think the labor market is legitimately continuing to deteriorate, this week?s figure was boosted by a special factor that is likely to continue for a few more weeks. At the beginning of the month, the federal government [...]