Hedonics Of Diamonds

People today really misunderstand the point of owning diamonds: even some big commercial organisations that are in the business of selling them – other than paying the standard lipservice that dates from another era - fail to give any kind of indication that they either really care about what they are doing, or care for the nature of the product itself. Like so many other things these days, the modern-day inheritors of other people's original achievements behave to a large extent as though they seem to actually begrudge the role they were handed along with the wealth which of course they readily took.

“Diamonds are a girl's best friend.” Well not if you go by the five investment banks that recently completely stuffed up the proposed float of Laurence Graff's diamond house. Apparently they – diamonds - are not anyone's friend at all. Not only did the banks fail to execute the supposedly planned book build, but they let slip to the market and to competitors in the process the very limited number of key clients that Graff had – no more than twenty in all. Many questions can be asked about what those investment banks were doing in conducting such a strategy that claimed a float target of a billion dollars – unnecessarily large if you couldn't be sure to make at least close to it – and wildly irresponsible to the client if in the normal exposure that occurs in a public float, sensitive and otherwise also confidential commercial information is scattered around in the breeze gratuitously when that event then becomes a failure.

And to another 'large extent' this sad tale is really testiment to the nothingness that the big brand-name investment banks have themselves become. Once proud and to-be-reckoned-with names like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, even H.S.B.C., cannot but expect to be castigated because of such a market failure (again!) of something they have tried to take to the professional financial investor. You can't make such an insane hash of something as prestigeous as a major diamondaire's public flotation and hope to maintain credibility.

And so now we're going to have to put up once again with the same old 'spin-city' peppering in the media about how diamonds are not good 'investments' and how synthetic diamonds have altered the profitability of the traditional market, and how diamonds have fallen out of favour with today's super wealthy (probably Chinese) elite. And how at the low end the ordinary consumer cannot afford them... And how the Greeks ought to pay their taxes and how austerity must prevail... Meanwhile of course, Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF pays no tax at all. Pure self-interest driven spin drivel; the whole lot of it. Welcome to today's world, though.

'Girl' is a general term; Elizabeth Taylor is a specific name.

See, the thing is – 'certain specific diamonds are certain specific girls' best friends...'

Best,
Calvin J. Bear