As the banking crisis demonstrated, they did what they could get away with, driven by what they maintained was the interests of their shareholders, and the bosses revelling in the status symbol of their bonuses.
For Brazil, the award of the games, hard on the heels of the World Cup, is yet another symbol of its growing status in the world.
Perched on a cliff overlooking the port, the Pelourinho meaning pillory, the symbol of municipal status in colonial Brazil district contains some 3, 000 historic buildings, most of them dating from 1650-1900.
And so begins the race to produce the college campus status symbol of the fall.
This became the darling of the Chinese wine market, the equivalent of a wine status symbol, so there might have been a bigger bubble there.
Ironically in the case of horse dung, the researcher says it became a status symbol through something of a fluke.
Stiletto Moody shoes are seen as a status symbol in the virtual world of Second Life.
The tags have become something of a status symbol among frequent fliers.
Christa Salamandra, an associate professor of anthropology at City University of New York, said that "traditionally, a luxurious mustache was a symbol of high social status, " and had figured heavily in matters of personal honor in the Arab world.
In the process, Epic has become something of a status symbol.
Although whisky producers claim to detect the first signs of a revival, selling Scotch as the liquor to drink while playing pool or cruising the dance floor poses a risk to the drink's long-term status as an international symbol of success.
The casual wear (which CEO Mark Zuckerberg still embraces even when meeting with the suits in New York) has become a bit of a status symbol there.
An American backyard status symbol they are the teal crystals that pepper any aerial view of Beverly Hills.
And there is one other thing the sobering fact that, as an international status symbol, manned space flight can also sometimes be something of a liability, especially for a normally secretive country such as China.
It is a leading brand in emerging markets, seen as a status symbol in a few countries, and as we have gotten a taste of in the press, the brand does have a few tricks up its sleeve: innovations in keyboard technology, motion sensor technology, as well as in cloud computing that will meet the growing needs of enterprise customers.
To Generation Y, a status symbol is more likely to be whether or not it has the new iPad or a certain level of freedom.
In the music industry, a stadium concert is the ultimate rock-star status symbol: Few acts can sell enough tickets to fill one, let alone a multitude of such venues year after year.
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