In the past five years, global registrations of the seven largest ultra-premium car brands–a group that also includes Aston Martin and Lamborghini–have surged by 154 percent, far outpacing the 36 percent gain in overall car sales worldwide.
Rolls-Royce registrations have risen almost five-fold. Almost 10,000 new Bentleys cruised onto the streets last year, a 122 percent increase over 2009, while Lamborghini rode a 50 percent increase to pass the 2,000 vehicle mark.
– From the Bloomberg article: Hyper-Luxury Cars Are Now Selling Faster Than Normal Ones
It’s an oligarch’s world, you’re just living in it.
One of the main reasons “hyper-luxury” cars are outselling regular cars, is because all of the wealth gains from the oligarch recovery are going to, well, oligarchs. This has been a regular theme here at Liberty Blitzkrieg, and is further evidence that global policies implemented since the oligarch created financial melt-down, have been used to cover up its criminality, and further advance the status quo’s consolidation of wealth and power. A continuation of this trend presents the greatest threat to liberty, free markets and an evolution of human consciousness on the planet today.
First, let’s take a look at how the average standard of living in my hometown of NYC is being impacted by the oligarch recovery. From the New York Post:
To combat the city’s housing shortage while serving its high number of single adults who may share apartments with multiple roommates in this ridiculously expensive town, a new housing complex is set to come to the rescue. Consisting of 55 prefabricated, modular studio apartments, My Micro NY is now being assembled in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with the units to be stacked atop one another, forming a 10-story building on East 27th Street in Manhattan.
Each pad, designed for single humans and even pairs, measures just 260 to 360 square feet — or about the size of a Hollywood starlet’s walk-in closet. The developer was granted a waiver from the city’s zoning and density laws to create living spaces smaller than the already tiny minimum of 400 square feet, set in 1987.
It gets worse.
The apartments are to rent for $2,000 to $3,000 a month! (Less if you score an “affordable” space.)
New York City head shrinker Dr. Alan Hilfer, who recently retired as the chief psychologist at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center, told me the micro-apartment idea has been tried in Japan.
Of course, that nation had the world’s seventh-highest suicide rate in 2013, behind Greenland, Lithuania, South Korea, Guyana, Kazakhstan and Slovenia. (The United States’ suicide rate was pegged as 30th in the world in 2012.)
Don’t forget that as we learned in the post, The Face of the Oligarch Recovery – Luxury Skyscrapers Stay Empty as NYC Homeless Population Hits Record High, 30% of NYC’s most luxurious apartments sit empty so as to serve as money laundering proxy bank accounts for foreign oligarchs.
That’s what the peasant victims of oligarchy have to contend with. What about that tiny group of people which benefits disproportionately from the oligarch money spigot. We learn from Bloomberg that:
Things have grown ever more extraordinary for the one percent on four wheels. The fancy cars seem to be multiplying and taking unexpected shapes. Bentley moved to build a sport utility vehicle in 2013, a decision matched by Rolls last week. Ferrari brought out a 963-horsepower supercar with an electric motor, which has since been joined by an $840,000 Porsche with two electric motors. Orders and eager deposits have been pouring in.
Thanks to a bullish economy and a burgeoning crop of multi-millionaires all over the world, the handful of carmakers catering to the very richest have finally started to figure out that they have been drastically underestimating demand for six- and seven-figure vehicles. That realization has fueled a new generation of interesting machines whose eye-popping price tags have widened the ultra-premium market. At the moment, unlike in decades past, the fastest-selling products in the auto business are also the ones that cost the most.
Gotta love how the author conflates “bullish economy” with a growing number of extremely rich people.
In the past five years, global registrations of the seven largest ultra-premium car brands–a group that also includes Aston Martin and Lamborghini–have surged by 154 percent, far outpacing the 36 percent gain in overall car sales worldwide. Much of the growth has come from Maserati and Porsche, two companies that sell many of their vehicles for less than $100,000. Even excluding those brands, however, the swanky car segment has swelled by 62 percent since 2009.
Rolls-Royce registrations have risen almost five-fold. Almost 10,000 new Bentleys cruised onto the streets last year, a 122 percent increase over 2009, while Lamborghini rode a 50 percent increase to pass the 2,000 vehicle mark.
The boom in business, for the most part, comes from a simple supply-demand relationship: Growing ranks of wealthy consumers want more opulent toys. At the end of last year, about 211,000 people had a net worth of at least $30 million—a 13 percent increase from 2011, according to UBS and the research firm Wealth-X.
Meanwhile, average real wages have barely budged. Further proof that this isn’t a recession, it’s a robbery.
The supercars that don’t aim for the top end of the speedometer, meanwhile, have focused on offering custom options. Four out of five Rolls-Royces sold last year went through what the car maker calls its “bespoke process.” The coaches can be had with hand-engraved picnic sets, embroidered headrests, lambs-wool floor mats, and light-up hood ornaments. Rolls-Royce craftsmen will even stitch hundreds of diamonds into the ceiling lining to resemble a night sky—not just any night, but the constellation pattern evident on a specific date.
IHS expects the super-premium car market to expand by an additional 21 percent in the next two years, and blue-blood carmakers may blow past that target if their plans pan out.
In my opinion, money should primarily be seen as a tool. A tool that can be used for an almost infinite amount of projects and endeavors. While I completely defend a super rich person’s freedom to spend his or her fortune as her or she pleases, the fact so many are primarily employing this tool as a means to stroke one’s ego and narcissism is not only unfortunate, but serves as a perfect reflection of the mindset and consciousness of the global oligarchy and its religion of consumerism.
For related articles, see:
As the Middle Class Evaporates, Global Oligarchs Plan Their Escape from the Impoverished Pleb Masses
New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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I do believe that historians of the future will come to see the “too big to fail” phrasing from the first decade of the 21st century as similar to the quote attributed to Marie Antoinette at the end of the 18th century, to wit, “Let them eat cake.” Both utterances come from the upper class to the lower class and both are intended as a reasonable and logical suggestion as to how to deal with a crisis that does not affect the party uttering the words. And both are completely insensitive, bordering on ignorant, as to the true causes of the crisis and how the crisis impacts the common people, the majority, the masses. In early 2014 one of the Fed governors revealed candidly that the actions taken by that body post-2006 dramatically increased the wealth of the rich, but may not have done much for anyone else. This is data verifiable. Even at the turn of the 20th century the divide between the two classes was never as great as it is now. There is one difference however. In France, this attitude led to reform. In the US it led to food stamps. Plus ca change…
–Dr. M. Buckman
As usual, those humans who are primarily preoccupied with status are behind the bling curve, and dangerously so. Simple logic explains why.
No one in their right mind would drive a Rolls-Royce into a Rio favilla. You might as well just leave the keys on the seat and shoot yourself in the head. Guess what? The ultra-super-fab-outrageously rich are working overtime to turn as much of the world’s inhabitants into its native counterpart as possible. In the not too distant future, NO place will be safe for someone flaunting such extreme wealth.
Do they want to spend all that money on armed guards, walled compounds and high-tech monitoring equipment…and not be able to do anything more than circle the drive in front of their mansion in a Bentley? Because the fuse is lit already–you may have noticed–and when it goes off, no one in their right mind will want to be identified as wealthy.
I predict they will be shedding the outward symbols of extracted wealth faster than a Wehrmacht private ditching his tunic in Berlin on May 1, 1945.
A great man once said it so eloquently: “Party on, asshole…your time is coming.”
I don’t understand this story. It starts out saying that luxury cars are outselling regular cars, then goes on to say that Lamborghini sold 2000 cars and there were 10,000 new Bentleys, but when I do a search for total car sales, it’s around 15 million. I don’t know what they mean by “luxury” car sales, but I doubt Mercedes Benz sold 7 million cars last year. It doesn’t look like this story is accurate.
I’m not sure what part of the story you don’t understand. It is referring to the growth rate in “hyper-luxury” cars sales versus the growth rate of regular car sales.