The 2009 wine, at $4,500 a bottle, was a lot cheaper than the 2015 will be.
Loïc Pasquet is probably the most controversial winemaker in the world. He specializes in making wine the way it was made before the phylloxera epidemic wiped out most of France's grapes in the 19th century. His ungrafted vines bear rare varietals like castets, mancin and pardotte, and he ages his wines in amphorae rather than oak barrels.
Where it stands: In 2015, 500 of Pasquet's precious autochthonous vines were destroyed by vandals who cut them down to the roots; a couple of months later, Pasquet was found guilty of defrauding the European Union of more than $650,000 that he received in aid and grants for promoting his wine, mostly in China.
Driving the news: Pasquet has announced that his 2015 vintage — just 550 bottles in total — will sell for €30,000 (about $34,000) per bottle. He claims that the difference between his wine and his neighbors' is "the same difference as between a 2CV Citroën and a Ferrari."
There will be no 2016 vintage, partially because of the vandalism, and no 2017 vintage either, because of frost damage. The 2018 vintage, the first to see no wood at all, might well exceed the 2015 in price.
Why it matters: Pasquet has been extremely successful at selling his wine in Russia and China. There's no other wine quite like it in the world, and it's made in such low quantities that he can effectively name his price. The kind of people he's selling to will see no measurable impact on their net worth after dropping $270,000 on a six-pack of Liber Pater. Instead, they will simply convert money into happiness. It's a well-known phenomenon: The more you spend on a wine, the more you enjoy it.
Data: Unison Home Price Volatility Index; Chart: Andrew Witherspoon/Axios
You wouldn't make a 5x leveraged bet on the S&P 500 — not unless you were an extremely sophisticated financial arbitrageur, or a reckless gambler.
Even then you wouldn't put substantially all of your net worth into such a bet. Stocks are just too volatile. But millions of Americans make 5x leveraged bets on their homes — that's what it means to borrow 80% of the value of the house and put just 20% down.
By the numbers: Unison, a housing-finance startup, has crunched U.S. house-price data in a paper to be released tomorrow. Over the long run, any given home is likely to experience price volatility of about 15% per year; during the height of the crisis, that number spiked to more than 35%. That's broadly in line with the kind of volatility you see in the stock market.
Unison's results are in line with public data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which show annualized house-price volatility, over the past 10 years, ranging from 12% in Alaska to 17% in Hawaii, New York, and the District of Columbia.
Be smart: Annualized house price volatility is much greater than the amount you can expect a home to rise in value over the long term. That number is closer to about 4%. While homes are much less volatile than individual stocks, they're just as volatile as the kind of diversified stock indices most people invest in.
The bottom line: Any given home has roughly a 30% chance of ending up being worth less in five years' time than it is today. If you can't afford that to happen, you probably shouldn't buy.
It's easier to turn power into money than it is to turn money into power. That said, if you want power, and even if you want money, it helps a lot if people think you're a billionaire.
Driving the news:Jeffrey Epstein, whose pedophilia is now back in the public eye, was almost invariably described as a billionaire even when there was no evidence that he was worth anywhere near that much money.
Epstein's conspicuous displays of wealth included owning the largest private residence in New York (9 East 71st, which was originally purchased by one of his clients, Les Wexner) and a $10 million charitable foundation called Gratitude America (which seems to have been funded by another client, Leon Black). They also included private jets and a private island in the Caribbean.
Epstein's mysterious yet ultra-opulent lifestyle served two purposes. It helped to seduce both men and women — and it gave him an aura of impunity. By creating a bubble of spectacular privilege, he successfully persuaded everybody — not only his friends, but the underage girls he was accused of having sex with — that he was untouchable. Even after the bubble burst, he got away with an astonishingly light punishment for his crimes.
Epstein is far from being the first fake billionaire. Malaysian fraudster Jho Low similarly attempted to buy himself impunity, with some success: He remains at large.
The power of Elizabeth Holmes, of Theranos fame, resided almost entirely in the fact that people thought she was a billionaire.
Most intriguingly, press baron Robert Maxwell stole $600 million from his newspapers' pension plans in order to keep his empire together. His daughter Ghislaine went on to become Epstein's closest confidante (and co-defendant).
The bottom line: Some people want to be wealthy; criminals, by contrast, often find it more useful to be perceivedto be wealthy. The genuinely rich tend to care about preserving and growing their wealth. Really big spenders are disproportionately likely to be frauds.
