Years worth of Fed money printing by Alan Greensapn and Ben Bernanke have launched a flood of overseas buyers with dollars in hand, to compete against American buyers.
Alex Williams at NYT explains:
This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style — the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs — at bargain prices...
...even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching as outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.
Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans...
The number of international travelers who will visit New York in June, July and August is expected to rise by about 118,000 from 3.12 million last summer (that number itself was a record —and an estimated 20-percent jump from 2006), according to forecasts by NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing bureau...
Meanwhile, the euro has hovered near record highs against the dollar all summer; it is up 22 percent in the last two years, and since 2001, has nearly doubled against the dollar. Over the last five years, the yen is up nearly 12 percent against the dollar, the British pound 23 percent, the Swiss franc nearly 31 percent, the Danish krone 42 percent, the Australian dollar nearly 45 percent....
Richard Thomas, the marketing director of Marquee, the Chelsea nightclub, said he has seen a surge of European clients this summer, and even visitors who appear to be of humbler origins than the usual Gucci-clad jet-setters are now “willing to play in the arena of bottle service,” he said, referring to the practice where drinks are purchased only a bottle at a time, for hundreds of dollars or more.
These are “people with more modest incomes, who wouldn’t just walk up and say, ‘Hey, let me get a table’ if they’re back home in London, where it’s too expensive to go to Boujis,” Mr. Thomas said, referring to a popular club in that city’s Kensington district. “But in New York, they can get away with it.”...
“Back home they’re just run-of-the-mill cubicle people,” Ms. Farsad added, “but here, they’re like three parts Kimora Simmons and two parts Oasis, circa 1995.”...
Marie Monte, 23, a law student from Paris who was vacationing in New York last week, said she felt sorry for today’s currency-challenged Americans...
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