Source: flickr

Dear Diary,

It's cold here in Manhattan. We've never lived in New York. And every previous visit had left us unenthusiastic.

The city is not pretty… at least not compared to Paris. And Lower Manhattan always seemed gritty, dirty and unkempt. Like a homely man or a homeless woman.

But a lot has changed. New York is now full of foreigners. Enter our hotel lobby and you hear a din of strange and familiar accents: English, French, Russian… and many we've never heard before. (We make a small contribution to the cacophony by taking Portuguese lessons in the tearoom.)

Soho is full of young people – often dressed in country duds. Almost all the men below 40 have facial hair. One man at a fancy restaurant we were eating in wore a plaid shirt and had a full beard. He looked like a lumberjack.

“That's the style,” said our 26-year-old son, Jules.

Here on the Bowery the pace is fast… and there are new shops, luxury stores and chic restaurants on every street.

Just a few blocks away is Wall Street. Thanks largely to the feds, more and more of the world's wealth runs through the US financial industry.

Money Moves Around

“Isn't nature marvelous,” we began, obscurely, a monologue directed at our wife, Elizabeth.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it never would have occurred to me that I should pay $10 for a cup of coffee and a cookie… or $200 for a theater ticket… or $500 a night for a hotel room… or $1,200 for what looks for all the world like a 1970s Danish Modern chair.

“Of course, I never thought people would pay ‘2 and 20.'

“That's what hedge funds charge – 2% of invested capital and 20% of profits – for money management. But when you hang around in New York for a while it all begins to seem normal.”

Uptown, developers are putting up the most expensive condos in the history of the world. From Forbes: