The Rich Get Richer - and the poor get poorer
by Mike K-H
Every Sunday morning, I buy a local French paper and the UK Saturday Telegraph - except for the days when the shop doesn’t receive it, which have become more frequent this year. After I’ve checked to see how Michael Wright is getting on a little way to the north of me (one hobby we share is looking after little black Ouessant sheep) I check out the money, property and motoring sections.
Although there are sections giving advice to that large fraction of the UK population stuck between a rock and a hard place as interest on the excessive debts they were enticed into taking on during the ‘NICE’ decade rises beyond their ability to repay it, I notice that a lot of the content is about the very rich (Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, as the people who cater for their needs call them).
All the money we ordinary folks no longer have in our pockets is going somewhere. Some of it is paying for the follies of companies that specialised in lending to people who never had a hope in Hades of repaying, and some is going to governments to fund their efforts to paper over the cracks and convince us to re-elect them because none of this was their fault. But the rest is ending up as pocket money for people whose sources of wealth are either immune from or even increased by the current state of economic recession no-one wants to admit exists (bankers, oil barons, arms salesmen…).
Rolls-Royce sales of cars costing about a third of a million pounds each is growing in a way that gives the small number of people emlpoyed to make 100 Phantom Coupés in the little town of Goodwood this year a sense of job security, so we should perhaps be thankful for small mercies.
Most big properties in Dorset are family seats that will only come on the market if the family loses the ability to finance their upkeep, but this week 82-year-old Tommy Kyle, a man brought up on a ‘pretty’ North Carolina cotton farm, whose hobby is renovation on a grander scale than we ordinary folks can even dream about, is selling Thornhill Park. Although it has only 100-odd acres of land, it is being offered for £12 million - a price comparable with that obtained over the last few years by very rare local properties encompassing ten to twenty times as much land. And it is likely to sell quite quickly.
Tommy’s track record for restoring old houses and creating beatiful gardens includes Buck Farm in Pennsylvania, Château de la Croix des Gardes in Provence and Château Manville in Normandy. However, it looks as though he has decided that he’s too old to tackle any more. He’s moving to Monte Carlo, where it’s difficult to find enough space to park a car, let alone create a deer park.
