For years, left-wing commentators have been predicting that the death of damned neoliberalism is now truly imminent. The internet bubble, the great recession, the euro crisis and the corona crisis came and went, not to mention the tequila crisis, the samba effect and the Icelandic banking crisis, but each time the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism refused to take its last breath. blow.
On June 4, put it in your agenda, it will happen anyway. That day the first edition of the glossy magazine explodes HTSI on the doormat at Financial Timessubscribers. Last Saturday, when readers marveled at advertisements of 33-year-old single malt whiskeys for $8,000 a bottle, or an app-driven, self-cleaning, ultra-violet litter box for $558, the magazine of the world’s very rich was still simply called How To Spend It†
After 28 years, however, this title no longer reflects “the deeper sensitivities and priorities of a changing world,” the salmon-pink business newspaper announced Monday. So the consumer bible, which is widely read among plutocrats and kleptocrats, full of yachts, starred restaurants and Swiss watches – Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was a loyal reader, it turned out after his death – will henceforth go through life as HTSI† Which is unfortunately an anagram of “shit,” as readers immediately noted.
“We’ve been through a global health disaster for two years,” explains HTSIeditor-in-chief Jo Ellison made the decision. “We are in the midst of a purchasing power crisis. We have published issue after issue against the background of the war in Ukraine. We want everyone to feel that the magazine offers something life-affirming, enriching and entertaining. And so we evolved.’ Moreover, ‘the irony’ with which the title How To Spend It once intended was no longer good today, notes Ellison.
The name change marks the end of an era. Over the past decades, the How To Spend It into an icon of ostentatious consumerism, a hyper-capitalist middle finger in times of growing inequality. What the grocery folder is to the common man, the cash cow is to the Financial Times – ads cost up to 88 thousand euros each – for the world’s richest 1 percent. In an ever roguish tone, the magazine instructs the Davos man what to do with his acid-avoided tax dollars: spend on a $30,000 Jaeger-LeCoultre watch with the moon phases in it, for example, or on a pair of gold, diamond, and tsavorite earrings. from Ileana Makri for 1,165 euros.
In recent years, Financial Timeseditors increasingly with the How To Spend It in the stomach. While the paper warned in its columns about the excesses of neoliberalism, the magazine told its readers that modern man cannot live without a bottle of Perrier-Jouët champagne in the fridge, or sea salt with white truffle on his soft-boiled egg.