HONG KONG — The front cover of the report by the respected audit and consulting concern Deloitte is dramatic and eye-catching: It consists of just a picture of a fedora hat reminiscent of the 1930s and, above it, a stark headline, "The Untouchables."
It is a little clumsy to make such references with their obvious echoes of 1929 and the Great Depression, widespread unemployment, economic distress and gangland killings and lawlessness. But the people about whom the report is written will probably not complain, since the original "Untouchables" were the good guys.
Deloitte is (presumably) using the expression in its broader sense that the modern untouchables are untouched or unaffected by the prevailing economic mess all around them. But the subjects of its report are not the financiers and bankers who escaped virtually unscathed from the mess they created; they are the big European soccer clubs, or the "Soccer Money League."