The Super-Rich
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON: With $1 billion in the bank, you have to try hard to avoid getting richer. Assuming a 10 percent rate of return, your arduous task is spending $100 million a year, or about $274,000 a day. Hermes ties will not get you there.
This may seem too marginal a problem to be of interest. Who has such money, after all? More and more people do. To make this year's list of the 25 highest paid hedge-fund managers, published by Alpha magazine, you had to make $240 million. At the top was James Simons of Renaissance Technologies with $1.7 billion. . .
In the United States, the top 300,000 earners pocketed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million in 2005. . .
Tax authorities in the United States and Britain resemble dinosaurs pursuing space ships. They have lost touch with the super-rich, as has most of humanity.
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ROGER COHEN Class Politics Britain U.S. News Obscene Wealth
