Today the press revealed some awfully decadent news on the financial front: New York's richest people are way richer than its poorest people, for one thing. The disparity is bigger than anywhere else in the country, according to the Times. Many of these people are so rich that they only trust their own companies with investment these days, observes CNN (in other words, they're paying themselves to make themselves richer). And if you wanted to know exactly how loaded these men and women are, CNN helpfully also calculates that CEOs make about 364 times what you probably do. Sound like a lot? Well, the average private-equity manager makes 61 times what CEOs do – roughly 16,000 times your measly salary.

We've been noticing more and more lately that the Times and other august publications have been devoting increasing amounts of coverage to rich people, and how they are richer than they have ever been before. It's beginning to make us a little worried. "Rich, rich, rich," they chant. "Everybody is so rich!" We're not experts, but don't you sometimes imagine there was a lot of this sort of thing just before the fall of the Roman Empire?

New York’s Gap Between Rich and Poor Is Nation’s Widest, Census Says [NYT]
Insider stock buys hit 4-year high: Report [CNN]
CEO pay: 364 times more than workers [CNN]
Related: The Running of the Hedgehogs [NYM]