Gisele Bündchen Hates America

James Joyner @ Gone Hollywood | Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Gisele Bündchen is willing to get her pictures taken here and have babies with our quarterbacks, but she won’t take our currency.

The world’s richest model has reportedly reacted in her own way to the sliding value of the US dollar - by refusing to be paid in the currency. Gisele Bündchen is said to be keen to avoid the US currency because of uncertainty over its strength. The Brazilian, thought to have earned about $30m in the year to June, prefers to be paid in euros, her sister and manager told the Bloomberg news agency. However, Ms Bündchen, 27, declined to comment on her pay arrangements.

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According to Brazil’s weekly magazine Veja, when Ms Bündchen signed a deal to represent Pantene hair products, she demanded that the brand owner, Procter & Gamble (P&G), paid her in euros. P&G was reported as saying that it could not comment on details of the contract. There are also reports that she will be paid in euros for a deal with Dolce & Gabanna to promote its The One fragrance.

“Contracts starting now are more attractive in euros because we don’t know what will happen to the dollar,” Patricia Bündchen told Bloomberg.

To be fair, Gisele Bündchen isn’t the only one nervous about the dollar.

Last month, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said that he was not confident about the strength of the dollar. “We are still negative on the dollar relative to most other currencies so we bought stocks in companies that earn their money in other currencies,” he said of his Berkshire Hathaway investment vehicle.

And Jim Rogers, a former investor partner of George Soros, told the BBC that if he was buying currency now it would be the Chinese renminbi, the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc and not the US dollar.

The dollar has slipped amid US interest rate cuts which have been trimmed to 4.5% after standing at 5.25% in September. This means that investors are looking to buy other currencies that will give a higher rate of return.

Sources: “Supermodel ‘rejects dollar pay’” (BBC) and “Supermodel Bundchen Joins Hedge Funds Dumping Dollars” (Bloomberg)