Issues & Opinions

From Bloomberg, dated yesterday (first seen in this morning’s WSJ – Breakingviews column):

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) — Gisele Bundchen wants to remain the world’s richest model and is insisting that she be paid in almost any currency but the U.S. dollar.

Or perhaps not – the story might be apocryphal, and even contains its own counterargument:

“Contracts starting now are more attractive in euros because we don’t know what will happen to the dollar,” Patricia Bundchen, the model’s twin sister and manager in Brazil, said in a telephone interview in September from Sao Paulo. She declined to discuss details of the arrangements last week.

No shock, that. The question is, how long it remains true.

“Gisele has contracts in dollars,” said Anne Nelson, Bundchen’s agent in New York at IMG Models, in an interview today. “When she works in Europe she gets paid in euros, when she works in the U.S. she gets paid in dollars, when she works in Brazil she gets paid in reais, and so on and so forth.”

Also self-evident. And it goes without saying that, in a world of fixed exchange rates (which, with few exceptions, doesn’t exist now and hasn’t for years), she could choose to simply do the math, and get her desired real pay rate at whatever nominal rate & currency she chose.

The fact that she or her IMG handler is reported to have decided to denominate pay in a currency other than dollars, presumably for future contracts, brings to mind the market mania of early this century, when people actually thought tech stocks would stay high forever.

Read the rest of the Bloomberg piece, by the way – it provides far more detail than did the Breakingviews column (due to format and space availability differences, I’m sure), and goes well beyond the only-moderately interesting fact of Gisele Bundchen’s purported payment preferences.