Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The one economic indicator that never stops rising: meet the Negroni Index

Plus: The perverse effects of capping bankers’ bonuses, and the BBC’s dangerous disdain for capitalism

This dispatch comes to you from Venice — where I arrived at sunset on the Orient Express. More of that journey on another occasion, I hope. Suffice to say that if you happen to have been wrestling with the moral choice of bequeathing what’s left of your tax-bitten wealth to ungrateful offspring or spending it on yourself, don’t hesitate to invest in a last fling on this time capsule of elegant extravagance. Made up of rolling stock built in the late 1920s, the train itself symbolises everything that 20th-century Europe was good at — engineering, craftsmanship, style, cross-border connections — when not distracted by political folly and war. Views from the bar car of triple-dip-recession-hit industrial Milan and Bologna seem to symbolise much that Europe habitually gets wrong, starting and ending with economic management.

Or so I mused, with a negroni in my hand and the lounge pianist playing ‘As Time Goes By’ in my ear. And naturally I thought of my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who loves trains and negronis: older readers will recall with pleasure his ‘Negroni Index’, a measure of the true international value of the old Italian lira and the newly launched euro. The 3,000-lira negroni was his benchmark, and I see from our archives that he was still able, in 2001, to buy three of these excellent cocktails for the equivalent of less than £10. I have to report that this is one index which has soared inexorably through all the market turmoils of recent years: three today, on the train or in any Venetian hotel, will cost you £50 — or if you order them at the lovely Locanda Cipriani on the island of Torcello and travel there and back by fast water-taxi, more like £300.

That too may feel like money well spent before the taxman nabs it — but my real point is that Venice’s fantastic prices reflect its status as a honeypot mercantile city-state, whose ancient foundations are being eroded as much by the marching feet of mainland Chinese and fat American tourists as by the wash of giant cruise-ships.

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