Surprisingly, the luxury-goods business is having a strong year, largely thanks to demand in China, the Gulf and other emerging economies. (Indeed, things have been so good that perfume-makers face a new product-liability problem in Russia, where oligarchs' girlfriends buy dozens of bottles in order to bathe in a fragrance, unaware that this can be deadly.) Japan, which experienced similar excesses in the 1980s, still accounts for around a quarter of global luxury-goods sales.
ECONOMIST: Why sales of luxury goods are slowing