Money Talks: Europe’s luxury crown

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The Economist.

Christian Blankart is an old hand when it comes to the world of European luxury.

I'm just writing a book called the Hundred Words of Luxury. I am a member of several board and advisory boards concerning the luxury business in general.

He joined the French luxury house Hermes in the early 90s and spent 15 years there in charge of the company's international development. Over the years, he's seen the industry transform.

The world of luxury has changed completely. So it became huge. It was small when I joined, all the families were there, only families. And now today, no family anymore except some very few families.

Hermes, which remains in family hands, is an increasingly rare exception in an industry that has come to be dominated by a handful of luxury conglomerates. LVMH, the largest of them all, now houses 75 different brands, from Louis Vuitton to Dior and Hennessey. The consolidation of the European luxury industry has occurred against a backdrop of dramatic growth. Over the past two decades, global sales of personal luxury goods have tripled to nearly $400 billion.

We're not talking about the same business at all. Millions of consumers have appeared. When I joined, there were very few consumers. They knew all their customers. Today, they don't know any of their customers.

That kind of growth is quite a feat for an industry built on the principles of craftsmanship and exclusivity. Last year, as consumers around the world tightened their belts, growth in the luxury industry began to slow. But still decades of expansion have turned Europe's luxury giants into some of the continent's most valuable firms. And globally, European firms continue to dominate the luxury landscape, accounting for two thirds of sales and nine of the 10 most valuable luxury brands. But Christian Blackhaert has a word of caution.

The luxury companies must be very careful, first of all, because they can die even if they are very famous. And that is true in the past. Secondly, because you don't know where is coming the competition. Nothing is granted in the luxury world.

So can the old continent's hold on the luxury business. Last, You're listening to Money Talks from the Economist, our weekly podcast on the markets, the economy and the world of business. In London, I'm Tom Lee Devlin.

In New York, I'm Alice Fulwood.

In Taipei, I'm Mike Bird.

And in today's show, can anyone bar Europe? Do luxury?

First we find out How European luxury's long history is its key strength.

So it's almost continuous. 500 years of production and exports and promotion.

Right.

They were very good at marketing these things.

Then we speak to the boss of Xenia, one of Italy's leading luxury firms.

We are home to three of the world's top luxury men's and women luxury names. Xenia, Tom Brown and Tom Ford.

And finally we discuss whether Europe can keep its luxury crown. Hi, Mike. Hey Alice.

Hey Tom.

Hello, Mike. You're in Taiwan. Alice, you're in New York. What takes you guys there?

I am here in Taipei because the Taiwanese election has just happened. I was here doing a bit of reporting on the consequences for the big Taiwanese businesses.

Yeah, I'm in New York just for some meetings. All the big banks reported earnings over the past few days. Yeah, just hanging out.

Well, it's fitting, Alice, that you're on location near fifth Avenue because we are talking about the luxury industry today. I'm very curious to know what sort of firsthand encounters either of you may have had with this market.

I will say I'm more of a Uniqlo man. I have not had many first hand encounters with the luxury market. I'll be honest. I did have a brief and regrettable trip to Bicester Village quite a few years ago, which for our international listeners is a British designer shopping outlet, which at least at the time was the only UK rail station where the stop was announced in Chinese as well as English, which I think tells you a little something about industry.

Over the past couple years there's been what I might describe as a lucrative arbitrage opportunity for any American residents who are paid in dollars when they go and visit Europe. Because a combination of the sort of strength of the dollar, the weakness of the euro, the differential pricing that European brands tend to do. Stuff's cheaper in euros anyway, and the sort of tax refund process you can go through when you buy anything in Europe and take it outside the EU mean that the price for say, and you know, this is obviously a very theoretical example, a handbag from Celine or perhaps Bottega Veneta in Paris or Italy or you know, Amsterdam or any other major European country or city I might have happened to visit over the last few years is actually only about two thirds of what you would pay in the US in New York. And in fact the differential is so lucrative that you can actually make money buying bags in Europe and selling them on consignment in America, even after the sort of handsome fees that they, that these Businesses take. Now, obviously that would rely on you actually, you know, not just keeping things for yourself. But as I say, this is all theoretical, of course.

Yes, I suppose that may cast a new light on your jet setting ways, Alice.

The arbitrage only works if you don't include the cost of the flights, obviously.

Sure.

It depends how much you're buying, right?

Yes, I guess it does. But you know, I can't be the only one. Tom, what about you? Are all of your dapper suits really cut by Emporio Armani?

Unfortunately not. The only real item of luxury wear that I have is a very nice Jaeger LeCoultre watch that my wife bought me as a wedding gift, which was lovely.

Well, you'd be glad to hear that the Metropolitan Police have just busted a watch mugging gang. I believe this week there's some sort of big undercover operation. There's quite a cool video online. So you can rest easy, Tom, as I'm sure this is something you were concerned about before.

Can take it out of the safe now.

Exactly.

So handbags, watches, what exactly are we counting as a luxury here?

Yeah, well, I mean the luxury market defined very broadly encompasses kind of everything from super yachts to sports cars to fancy holidays and fine wine. But usually what most people think of when they think of this business is the personal luxury goods category it's called, which is worth about $400 billion worldwide. And you can think of that really as luxury items that you wear or carry on your person. Cosmetics also fits into the category too. And then I guess the question you have is what makes a good qualifiers luxury? Well, price is one obvious indicator, but you can't just, you know, slap an extra few zeros on the price tag and call something a luxury good. A focus on careful design and craftsmanship is another hallmark of a luxury good. So Hermes handbags, some of which sell for kind of upwards of $10,000, are made by hand by craftsmen who spend, you know, 20 hours or more on each bag. And then there's kind of this fuzzier element of desirability. And really a lot of what people pay for when they buy a luxury good is the feeling of being part of something prestigious or exclusive. And, and some brands actively cultivate that. You can't just walk into a store and buy an Hermes handbag, for example. You have to go through this long, drawn out process to get one.

So this is sort of scupper Alice's plans to get into the grey market import export business and become the sole trader of these items.

Secondhand there are hundreds if not thousands of these videos about how to get an Hermes bag and be offered one on YouTube now and blogs, and it seems like an awful lot of people are sort of interested in trying to get one. And luxury bags, you know, they used to be sort of relatively rare, but now you can see demand for them. It's absolutely everywhere now.

Yeah, exactly. And we heard at the start of the episode that the luxury industry has experienced a pretty incredible transformation over the past few decades. It's gone from being this small, almost kind of niche sector made up mostly of family owned businesses that primarily served very wealthy Europeans and Americans, to this global powerhouse that reaches customers all around the world. And partly that's been about the growth in the number of very rich people in places like China and the Middle east over that time period. And partly it's also about what folks in the industry call the democratization of luxury, where buying into these brands has become more accessible as they started to offer more entry level products like sunglasses or small leather goods like wallets.

See, you say accessible. I was looking earlier at an Hermes credit card holder that was more than £1,500, which, listen, I'm not one to judge, but I bought my credit card holder on Amazon and it was about $10, and I think it's made of old shoes.

Well, I suppose it's all relative, but one of the things that I find most striking about this story is that there's often a lot of pessimism around Europe. You know, it's often portrayed as the kind of crumbling empire fading into irrelevance. But Europe really continues to absolutely dominate this sector. And what we've seen is the emergence of a handful of European luxury giants that by rolling up some of those smaller brands, have become enormous, all while remaining incredibly profitable. And the most famous of those, obviously is lvmh, whose founder, Bernard Arnault, is the second richest man in the world. And then you also have Kering and Richemont, which are the other two big luxury conglomerates, and together they've had a very strong few years of growth.

Yeah, this definitely feels like a pretty good news story for Europe, which I suppose is the part of the world that doesn't always have a lot of good business news stories. But I am waiting, presumably for the inevitable question mark hanging over the whole thing.

Always. Always. So the past year has been something of a downer for the industry. So sales have started to slow as consumers around the world have been tightening their belts. Last week, Burberry, for example, which is a British luxury firm that's famed for its trench coats issued a profit warning after some disappointing Christmas sales. And the slowdown has been particularly painful, actually, for brands like Burberry that rely more on the kind of merely rich customers rather than the kind of positively loaded ones that companies like as Target. I think it's also important to keep a bit of perspective on this slowdown. So last year, according to the consultancy Bain, the luxury goods industry grew at 4%. Now that's well below the 20% it grew in 2022, but it's still pretty good for a discretionary spend category given the current economic conditions.

Yeah, I guess last year there were a lot of sort of bad news, economic stories about China. GDP growth in the EU was pretty much non existent, at least in the first three quarters of the year. America still seemed to be doing okay, but it does to be slowing down a bit now. So I imagine people's luxury budgets are getting a little thinner.

Yeah, I think that's right. But one thing that really hasn't changed is this dominance of European firms over the industry. And so today I want to unpack what that's all about. So to start us off, I spoke with Thomai Sodari. She's a professor of marketing at NYU Stern who focuses on the luxury business. Domai, thank you so much for joining us on Money Talks.

It's my pleasure.

Could you start by giving us a bit of the history around the development of the luxury industry?

Absolutely. It's a fascinating history because it started several centuries ago under the reign of Louis xiv, who during the time of building the Versailles, realized the breadth and depth of all the artisans who were preparing the palace and the furnishings for him and realized that he had an incredible industry that up to that point had not been organized. So actually it is thanks to Louis xiv, who thought of appointing the first minister of manufacturing to organize all the manufacturers, the artisans, the craftsmen who were working in France at the time so that he could develop the industry and make it really powerful in terms of exports. There are different stories, however. And so Italy, which of course had developed similar crafts during the Renaissance. Furnishings and textiles and beautiful objects for the home. But one difference between Italy and France is that the modern state of Italy is something very recent. And so the expertise that was very local to the city states has actually remained very local all the way to today.

And looking globally, why do you think European firms have proven to be so dominant in the luxury space for so long?

Well, having the support of the state in terms of France, so it's almost continuous. 500 years of production and exports and promotion. Right. They were very good at marketing these things. But also taking into account the Italians and the Swiss, it has to do with the fact that the professions that result in the production of these very beautiful and high quality luxury goods are professions that have endured. There are professions where there is apprenticeships, people are taken in to develop the expertise. And the expertise is something that hasn't left the original place of production. There is continuity in terms of knowledge that is recorded, then passed on to the next generation. Therefore, their output is at least the same level of quality as their ancestors.

And looking across the Atlantic at high end American fashion firms, they really tended to land at the more affordable end of the luxury market. Is that a result of having weaker brands or is it kind of a deliberate attempt to focus on that end of the market, do you think?

In the US the entire fashion industry was outsourced at some point. So production has left the US and that is a weakness. Compared to the Italians, compared to the French, that are still using the same factories, expertise and processes that have been using for all these years. There isn't really the same type of luxury brand. I would never put the two together. To me, these are apples and oranges. American brands have value and there is luxuriousness that comes from luxury brands in the us but it's a very different type of value compared to their European counterparts.

And focusing back on Europe, one development we've seen in the industry over the last few decades is a shift towards greater vertical integration. A lot of luxury brands have been buying up their suppliers. How do you make sense of that?

It's happening because they do realize that this is what gives a brand their competitive advantage. Brands that have been very old, for example Hermes, Hermes has always been vertically integrated. They've always owned their factories, they've always owned their silk production, and they have been adding to the types of industries that they need to create the variety of goods that they're selling today. Then other brands realize that in order to have a competitive advantage and to have access to the best and rarest raw materials, they have to vertically integrate, which is also what gives them a lot of control over the quality of the goods that come into the supply chain through their suppliers. And of course, in luxury brands, this integration goes all the way to what food an alligator is eating and what is the environment of the particular farm for the cows, so the entire environment.

Another pattern that we've seen in recent decades is towards greater horizontal integration, particularly in the French Luxury industry with firms being rolled up into conglomerates like lvmh. What has been causing that?

That is very different. And that started with, let's say, a few individuals ambitions. So Mr. Arnault of LVMH, Mr. Pinault of Caring, who had the interest and insight, along with the ambition to put together financial portfolios that focus specifically in areas of the luxury market. So it's a very deliberate decision with investment in mind. They have honed in their craft of figuring out which luxury brands should be integrated next, perhaps because they have been family owned, but they grow up to a certain point. So a lot of these legacy brands at some point found themselves in a state of weakness and they needed someone to come and infuse them with cash to preserve them domain.

Thank you so much for joining us on Money Talks.

Thank you for having me.

So, Mike, Alice, one other thing that I think is often kind of underappreciated as an explanation for why Europe does so well in the luxury space is this kind of continuing fascination that much of the world has with European culture. You know, Europe continues to be home to seven of the 10 most visited countries in the world. Rich and famous still gather in the summer on the Riviera for lavish parties. And I think that kind of fascination with European heritage is also maybe an explanation for this. But what are your thoughts so far on what we've heard?

Yeah, I think certainly looking at this from a sort of Asian perspective, you can't understate the importance of continuous history and heritage and just the fact that when people visit Europe, it does feel so steeped in continual history and how visible that is. And so it's perhaps you know, not a surprise that Europe dominates there for the same reason that it does in tourism. You know, there's quite a lot of very large Asian cities where you're looking at something with very little sort of continuous history going back more than 100 years and certainly not a lot of capital accumulation of the sort that you needed to sort of build that historical legacy. I guess the pessimistic way to look at this is whether it's tourism or luxury, Europe is turning into a sort of museum where it just trades on legacy and it's only producing things that relate back to hundreds of years of history rather than new things. Not only, of course, but there's an element of that. You know, you can go to these largely dead cities and pick up some Louis Vuitton at the equivalent of a museum gift shop. But yeah, it's still a good thing.

Of course, I hadn't actually realized quite how far back the French luxury industry started. I did find it funny that it sort of predates the French Revolution and was sort of set up by the monarchy and, you know, that populist uprising was not enough to stop it in its tracks. It was also interesting to hear how the sort of big behemoth luxury brands keep a grip on their quality standards or that history, I guess by things like Hermes being totally vertically integrated, having complete control over its production line. I guess a combination of how long those processes have been done in Europe and the fact that the big brands still rely on them today is sort of a combination of what makes Europe so dominant in this space.

Well, shortly we'll be hearing from the boss of one of Italy's leading luxury firms. But before we do, we want to let you know that we've made this episode of Money Talks available to listen to for free. But if you want to listen to us every week, you will need to be an economist subscriber.

For full details, search online for Economist Podcasts.

Plus so we've heard how European companies have come to dominate the luxury space, but how are they adapting to maintain their position? To find out more, I spoke to Ermenegildo Zhenya or Gildo as he's known. He's the third generation CEO of the family run Zegna Group, one of the most successful luxury companies in Italy. He spoke to me from Milan on the last day of Men's Fashion Week there and you can even hear the church bells accompanying our conversation in the background. Gildo Zegna, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

Hello. Thank you very much Tom. Delighted to be with you today.

Let's start with a bit of the history of Xenia. Can you tell us briefly about the company's story to date?

My grandfather, a namesake, founded the company as a small wool mill 114 years ago in Tribero, Italy. We are now a listed multi brand luxury platform that is home to three of the world's top luxury men's and women luxury names. Xenia, Tom Brown and Tom Ford. And we control, I would say Italy leading luxury textile laboratory platform.

And you mentioned there the Tom Brown and Tom Ford acquisitions which are relatively recent and both of those are actually American fashion labels. Can you tell us a bit about what motivated those acquisitions?

To be blunt with you, that happened just before COVID We were kind of stuck in growth and we were not adding new customer to the brand. So we decided to do one thing is the rebranding of Remedito Zane into one brand only. And we decided to move from classic tailoring into a luxury leisure where we executed the plan and after two years we are happy to have embraced this strategy of silent luxury. On the other side, I felt that scale was important and in 2018 we thought that we had opportunity to control a luxury American brand. Tom Brown, one of the best example of modern tailoring is a very iconic brand, has a different customer base than ours, has a very strong follow in Asia, has women, has accessories and I think it's very iconic and I think that we did a good job because we more than doubled the business in the past few years. However, when the occasion came to be part of the Tom Ford journey, we decided to go and we were able to control the fashion part Tom Ford Fashion. So to cut a long story short, being able to consult three brands of the top of luxury with different clients and DNA I think that meant to achieve better scale, be more attractive to talents, to better utilize our economy scales in our integrated supply chain and to be able to better negotiate real estate. I mean one of the most important things in retail today, if you ask me what is your group? We are probably more a luxury retailer than anything else. Even though the industry part is very, very important is to be in the right location.

And you mentioned there the opportunity of sharing a supply chain across the brands. And over the past few years you've actually acquired a number of companies in your supply chain. Can you explain the logic behind that?

Yes, listen, I'm very proud to be a man of the industry because the industry makes you in control of the know how of the people, brain and hands working through generations in the construction of the best made in Italy and 114 years means exactly like that. How to preserve this immense and unique know how that many other luxury companies try to buy. So it would have been silly for us to be one of the few remaining Italian not to be able to control more of the industrial know how pact. And so we decided we want to create the best platform in textile luxury being able to provide to ourselves or to the brand. We acquired the best of textile, the best of material, the best of finished product that we can provide. And so all these interesting small to mid sized family companies that we control makes a difference because you broaden up your portfolio in terms of what you can do and makes you more competitive. And I think that in our field the innovation factor led by research and development is key. We go by project and there are certain projects that takes six months, certain Projects take three years. And so you have to figure out what you want to be and where you want to go. And so the fact to be relying on this fantastic industry makes us really positive on the capacity to innovate and to differentiate ourselves from the others and being able to offer to our brand something that others cannot.

I want to ask about your reflections on Europe's role in the global luxury industry. So you've acquired a couple of premium American brands, but I think it's fair to say that besides a few exceptions, in general, most of the successful luxury brands around the world, and certainly the large luxury companies, are European. What do you think is behind Europe's enduring success in this industry?

I think that tradition has a lot to do with that. I would call it the hidden know how of doing things well. That is transferred from generation to generation, which is fantastic. And I think that if the family is still in the picture, I mean, it's easy to transfer from generation to nation. If not, you know, I think that management can do. But I think that this is part of the DNA of a brand. And I must say, in the case of Italy, there have been many designers that became entrepreneur. Look at Mr. Armani. Armani is probably the best case. I mean, he started, you know, from the retail and then product and then he became a fantastic brand designer entrepreneur. And it's a good example of that.

There's a lot of discussion at the moment around what seems to be a slowdown in the luxury industry as consumers start to tighten their belts. How worried are you about that?

You know, an entrepreneur. I think using worry is not the right word. You have to be on your toe. It's like playing tennis and being always ready to jump, to hit a hard ball or to make the points. You have to be fit. You have to be ready for hard balls and then short balls. And you have to be ready to hit back, ready for the best and for the worst.

And last question for you, Gildo. How do you see Xenia evolving as a company in future?

Zhenya has to remain true to his value and to his DNA. That's the most important thing. And I'm happy that the fourth generation that is helping me in this journey, in the young management. I'm the oldest block in town, if you can call the town the Zena Award. Don't overextend yourself to areas in which you don't know. Zinnia core business is the textile. I mean, is the apparel, is the ready to wear. But I think we are doing a good job on leather. I think that there is a lot to do with that. I think we have enough stores around the world, we have to make the store even more appealing. But I think we are on the right track. So if you ask me, what would you Recommend to the 4th generation? Just keep moving along the course that we have put together in the last couple of years. Just make sure you deliver.

Gildo, thank you so much for joining us on MoneyTalks.

Thank you very much for your time and for your interest.

So Mike, Alice, what do you make of what you've heard today?

Well, one thing that keeps coming up for me that we haven't talked about too much is the demand side of things regionally where Gildo was answering there about people tightening their belts. I'm really interested in how the situation in Chinese real estate and a slowdown in the Chinese economy in general might matter for this sector. Chinese demand has just been a huge, huge thing for luxury to the extent that you've had a meaningful impact on profits for a company like l' Oreal in the last year when the Chinese government has cracked down on Daigo, which is the sort of gray market shoppers trying to get luxury goods from Europe to China, the sort of Alices of this part of the world. And you know, if you go back far enough, you go to the early 1990s or a little bit after that. Maybe Japan was once playing the part of the sort of all important Asian luxury market. So these things can shift and they're not set in stone. There's a school of thought that suggests maybe actually trouble in the Chinese economy might be good for luxury good spending, or at least not as bad as it sounds because it's a sort of capital outflow. You're actually investing in something that to some extent holds its value. Of course, it's the opposite view, which is that the real estate slump is going to be terrible news for all forms of spending. But yeah, there's a huge link between the conditions and trends in the Chinese consumer economy and the health of the these companies.

Yeah, I do think that point about them being at least a sort of durable good that you theoretically are investing in or could resell for some of what you paid for. It does make them strange hybrid good. And it's been a completely wild time for the luxury industry because you've seen all kinds of investment assets from real estate obviously to stocks, artwork, NFTs, whatever, go through this sort of insane surge in the sort of aftermath of the pandemic and you can see the big luxury Houses are cashing in on it as well. If you look at the sort of price of a medium sized Chanel Classic flat bag, that was just under $6,000 in 2019, and in 2024, Chanel is supposed to be increasing the price to just under $12,000. So, you know, I know there's been a lot of inflation in the prices of most things, but they haven't quite doubled. Hermes for a long time operated this wait list. You could put your name down and you might get a call in a couple of years, but now there's just so much demand, they'd never get through it even for these sort of 10 or $20,000 bags. And I do think that there are some lessons from what luxury has gone through over the past couple of decades for other industries. You know, when I was reporting a piece about wealth management businesses late in last year, there was actually a sense that some of the big banks were looking at what luxury brands had done because they too are trying to transition from, you know, just managing the wealth of the leaders to managing the wealth of everybody else. You know, how do you go from just looking after Jeff Bezos money to looking after, you know, Jeff in Trenton, New Jersey's money as well, while still sort of making both Jeffs feel special and like they're accessing something elite or luxury. And you know, the luxury industry so far does seem to have managed to pull this feat off. But you know, as we pointed out, it's now facing some challenges cyclically from belt tightening. And it'll be interesting to see whether there's any structural issue that comes with trying to be both luxury and also becoming more ubiquitous.

Yeah, absolutely. And I really find this industry fascinating from a strategy perspective, perhaps unsurprisingly given I'm a massive business nerd. I think one of the things that's interesting is the whole trend towards vertical integration in the industry. All of these luxury firms like Xenuron and many others, buying up suppliers and even buying up alligator farms and sheep stations in Australia just to maintain an incredibly tight control over the supply chain. That's really the reverse of what's happened in most other industries around the world over the past few decades where there's been this kind of delayering of value chains and the kind of general consensus has been just focusing on the particular part of the production process that you are sort of differentially good at. But in the luxury space, that's really not been the thinking at all. Also, this whole idea of how do you limit the supply of your product to sort of maintain that sense of exclusivity and effectively to sort of help prop up demand for it. Hermes only increases its production capacity by 7% a year, very deliberately. It says it only thinks it can add that amount of quality craftsmanship into its network. But I think really it has the effect of continuing to create this aura of sort of exclusivity around its products that helps add to the demand for them. So I think it's a very interesting space. I think the logic in some respects works a bit differently to other industries. But kind of, as you were saying there, Alice, there's certainly some other industries like wealth management that maybe have things that they can take from the luxury world. But with that, I think it's time for us to pivot to our stats of the week. Who wants to kick us off?

I'm sticking with the theme of this week's episode, so I guess I can go first, which is roughly sort of 320%. And that is the amount of money you would have made if you'd invested a hundred dollars in the S&P 500 in 2011 or actually in a Chanel handbag. The returns have been comparable. The S and P does slightly have the Chanel handbag be it's sort of a bit close to 350. But the point Mike made about these being goods that you could think of as being a capital flow investment good type thing actually holds water, especially over the last two decades or so, sort of price rise in luxury goods has been so enormous that you would actually have made a very decent return buying Chanel 10, 15 years ago. That said, past returns are not an indicator of future performance. And I don't know if that will repeat. But if you had a time machine, it'd be great to go back to 2011 or 1990 or wherever and buy a Chanel bag.

I'd probably still buy Bitcoin if I.

Had the time machine.

Although I was thinking then, you know, on the one hand this is an investment advice and on the other hand you can't put your keys, wallet and phone in AN S&P 500 ETF. So there's, there's arguments of favor in both directions. My stat of the week is actually sort of semi related. It is 16,673 and that is the one day high of the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong in August 1997. The reason I've chosen that this week is because the Hang Seng is now back below that level. It's down 9% for the start of the year, it's having a really, really dismal time. It's just not performed very well over the long term. But also the sort of connection to a slowing Chinese economy not helping at all. And again, proof that sometimes you can do much worse than investing in a luxury handbag. Much, much worse.

We're going to see a shift in Mike's portfolio structure very soon. You know, ditching all the Chinese equities. And suddenly he'll be toting some chic togs for once.

Listen, if I'd invested in Chinese equities, I would not be able to afford anything chic anymore.

Well, my start of the week is not related to the luxury industry. It is 33, which is the number of superhero films in the Marvel Cinematic universe that began with Iron man back in 2008. And I took this from a great story in our culture section last week that explores why Marvel is losing its steam. So I just think 33 movies is too many. Maybe it's because I'm, you know, 15 years older than I was when they started, but I personally find these movies very uninteresting now. So I, for one, am marveled out. But what about you guys?

Tom, this is the oldest you've ever sounded.

Yeah, yeah. This is dismal. This is dismal. We're sat here going like, and who's Ant Man? I don't remember that one.

Well, on that note, all that's left is for me to thank Gildo Xenya and Domai Sodari.

And thank you for listening to Money Talks.

You can always write to us@podcastseconomist.com Today's.

Show was produced by Dan Asher and Marie Keyworth.

Our sound engineer is Tingley Lim, and.

The executive producer is Marguerite Howe.

I'm Tom Lee Devlin.

I'm Mike Bird.

I'm Alice Fulwood.

And this is the economist Sam.