Toxic wives and the business cycle

From the Daily Telegraph, sad stories of women who love the easy life more than they love their husbands. Here's a long snip from the start of the article:

You loser!" screamed Katie, aiming a vase at her husband. "You've destroyed my life,'' she continued, hurling it. "Just look at my hair, look at my nails! You loser, you jerk, you nobody."

Katie's husband, Jack, whose property portfolio disintegrated in the financial crash, had just told his wife that she would have to cut back on her thrice-weekly visits to Nicky Clarke, the nail salon in Harvey Nichols, and the oxygen facials, chemical peels and seaweed wraps at Space NK.

Not only that, but they no longer had the money to pay for an army of bullied Eastern Europeans to wait on her hand and foot.

Worse was to come – the brow-lift would have to be cancelled; her black Amex card would have to be snipped in half; and there was no way, he told her, that he could carry on spending £28,000 a year on Henry's school fees at Eton.

Chloe, too, would have to leave the marginally cheaper (only £25,000 pa) Wycombe Abbey immediately.

Such was the aggression and verbal and physical abuse that followed that Jack was left with cut lips and blood streaming from a broken nose.

Their eight-year-old child, not yet at boarding school, sat cowering in a corner and dialling 999. When they arrived, they had to restrain Katie forcibly from attacking her husband.

An extreme and isolated example of the global economic meltdown hitting the £1 million home? Sadly no. When the super-rich feel the pinch, inevitably, the Toxic Wife heads off.

One wonders once again why long-term prostitution, which is what this sort of marriage really is, is perfectly legal in the US, while the short term sexual rental market is not. Perhaps the reverse arrangement would be welfare-improving?