4/7/2023 0 Comments Roman empire plutocracy![]() ![]() The job made headlines in 2009, when Bank of America, which had rescued a struggling Merrill, got a $45-billion bailout from the U.S. Michael Smith redecorated the Oval Office and the East Wing of the White House in 2009, but his most famous commission is his $1.2-million facelift of the Manhattan office of John Thain, the last CEO of Merrill Lynch. Purveyors of luxury, like interior designers, are becoming superstars, too. It is not just the stellar providers of business services, like lawyers, who profit from the rise of the super-elite. But because globalization and technology have made his clients rich, they have made Boies a superstar, too. He is something of a Luddite, as well-he sends fewer than a dozen e-mails a week and was only recently persuaded by his wife to get an iPad, which he mostly uses to check stock prices. Boies has never lived outside the United States, speaks only English, travels overseas only for an annual biking holiday in southern Europe, and has never appeared in a non-American court. The willingness of richer clients, with more at stake, to pay higher fees is why even those superstars who aren't directly affected by the new engines of wealth generation-globalization and the technology revolution-can nevertheless benefit from them. It is this logic of big numbers that is driving up the fees of Boies and a cadre of elite lawyers. government, was liable for up to $150 million of Greenberg's legal fees.) (Further sweetening the transaction was the judge's eventual ruling that AIG, then nearly 80% owned by the U.S. When you have $4.3 billion at risk, $100 million-only 2.3% of the total-just isn't that much money. Yet, for Greenberg, it was a terrific deal. That was one of the richest fees earned in a single litigation. But he is both.īoies and his eponymous firm earned a reputed $100 million for the nine-month job of defending Greenberg. With his trademark slightly ratty Lands' End suits (ordered a dozen at a time by his office online), his midwestern background, his proud affection for Middle American pastimes like craps, and his severe dyslexia (he didn't learn how to read until he was in the third grade), Boies comes across as neither a superstar nor a member of the super-elite. For his defence, Greenberg hired the much sought-after New York lawyer David Boies. It was a high-stakes battle, as AIG accused Greenberg, through a privately held company, Starr International, of misappropriating $4.3-billion worth of assets (all currency in U.S. And they too are soon absorbed into the plutocracy.Ĭonsider the 2009 legal showdown between Hank Greenberg and AIG, the insurance giant he had built. As the world economy grows, and as the super-elite, in particular, get richer, professionals who work for the super-rich can charge super-fees. But the global super-elite has other components too, thanks in part to a rising-tide effect first noticed by economist Alfred Marshall more than a century ago. In the popular imagination, "the 1%" consists of equal parts inherited wealth and financiers' ill-gotten gains. ![]()
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