Feeling a need to escape the crash of 2008?
The senior executives at De La Rue Plc in Basingstoke, England, have taken flight to Malta, and right now they're making more money than anyone else in the world.
``It's tough times and the meeting is important,'' says Gary Williams, spokesman for the 187-year-old company that annually prints some $40 billion worth of bank notes for 150 countries from Fiji to Guatemala.
For Americans, too, taking an exotic break from the global monetary chaos may be in order. Suicide rates in the U.S. increased from 14 to 17 per 100,000 people in the decade after the crash of 1929, according to records in the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site.
That was an era when one of the more popular getaways was the ``farm holiday,'' where the friends of foreclosed homeowners refused to bid on their neighbors' properties and instead hauled the furniture back inside.
As University of Virginia historian Cindy Aron tells it, the Great Depression gave birth to the U.S. vacation industry.
``Vacations actually came into vogue in the 1930s,'' says Aron, author of ``Working at Play'' (Oxford University Press), a history of Americans getting away from it all. ``Working-class people began to negotiate for paid vacations and employers were willing to concede them because they made the workforce more loyal.''
Aron says that Americans, unlike Europeans, still don't accept time off easily. ``We've always been afraid of the temptations that lurk in leisure,'' she says. ``But just about everybody during the Great Depression had access to a car, so they took them and went camping. The wealthy drove their cars to resorts.''
Vintage Bargains
With movers and moguls across the globe fretting over inflation, deflation, stagnation and the prospect of the U.S. being burdened with a $1 trillion deficit, quick-escape broker Michael Sheehan is urging the hoi polloi to hit the road and break away from the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune behind the wheel of a discounted vintage Ferrari.
``I've got a street-legal 1982 512 BBi series with 26,000 miles for $129,500,'' says Sheehan, president of Ferraris-on- line.com in Newport Beach, California. ``One owner, a former Lehman Brothers partner. The day Lehman tanked, he was asking $149,500.''
Sheehan says Sept. 15 may mark the moment when a red Ferrari ceased to be the prized piece of bling for Wall Street honchos. Since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy, Sheehan adds, the sticker price on a vintage Prancing Horse so far has slid 20 percent, echoing Great Depression humorist Will Rogers's observation that America is ``the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poor house in an automobile.''
``I normally get one call a day from clients asking me to sell their cars,'' Sheehan says. ``I'm now averaging six calls a day and that number will certainly rise. Nobody needs a Ferrari, they need a house.''
`Permanent Vacation'
Mark Pieth, president of the Basel Institute on Governance in Switzerland, says that U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox last week set a precedent for a flight of Ferrari fancy during a financial crisis. The word vacation derives from the Latin for exemption, as in the SEC's recent decision to ``vacare'' its rule that forces companies to put a price on difficult-to-value assets such as subprime mortgages.
``The only people who should go on a permanent vacation are the ones who worked in Wall Street's risk-management departments and a few regulators and central bankers whose names I won't mention,'' says Pieth, a World Economic Forum ``Global Leader'' in the field of government and financial regulation. ``What they allowed to transpire is pathetic.''
And where would the 59-year-old attorney rather be than huddling with economists to frame a new market order? ``There is no vacation from Wall Street's past gambles,'' Pieth says.
Coffee and Risk
Still, Peter L. Bernstein, economic historian and publisher of Economics & Portfolio Strategy, says the gambling spirit that led to the U.S. government's attempt to devise a bailout plan isn't about to vanish because underwriters since the day Edward Lloyd in 1687 opened his London coffeehouse have been willing to invest in almost any kind of risk.
As Bernstein recounts the story in his book ``Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk'' (Wiley) the ancestors of today's derivative traders were served coffee, tea and sherbet while writing policies against ``death by gin-drinking, the death of horses and assurance of female chastity -- of which all but the last are still insurable.''
Inside the MetLife Building in Manhattan, where the debt- ridden United Brands Co. Chief Executive Officer Eli Black in 1975 hurled a briefcase through his office window and followed it 44 stories down to his death on Park Avenue, crisis-management guru Robert Dilenschneider ponders the current crisis.
He explains how to insure against the impact of the proposed $700 billion financial-market escape plan crafted by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Seeking Relief
``The thing to do is rest and seek relief,'' says Dilenschneider, principal of the Dilenschneider Group Inc. ``Withdraw from the situation. There's too much gossip going around and it will overwhelm you.''
For the 64-year-old Dilenschneider, whose private clients include 20 of the Fortune 50 companies, stepping back from the explosion is the antidote to surviving the fiscal fallout. ``Go up the Nile. Take off for Turkey. Remove yourself,'' he says. ``This game is being played by a small number of people in New York and Washington.''
Dilenschneider's ideal bailout package trip is to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. ``It offers total relaxation,'' he says, ``but you can observe the game from there and get back quickly if needed.''
