Watch prices, if you haven’t noticed, have gone crazy. Not just at the high-end, not just in the primary market, not just on gold models. They have increased on everything, everywhere, seemingly all at once. The phenomenon has been most notable at auction, where sales now regularly feature timepieces that break the once-rare million-dollar barrier. That’s true of small, online-only sales—such as Marteau & Co.’s third auction this month, which set a world record for the independent watchmaker Kari Voutilainen when his Regulator Decimal Repeater sold for $1,966,718—as well as major global sales, like Phillips’s June auction in New York, which achieved a total of $75.8 million, including 16 watches that fetched more than $1 million, one of which was a record-breaking F.P. Journe that hammered at over $13.9 million. Two days after the Phillips sale, Paul Boutros, the house’s deputy chairman and head of watches in the Americas, said even he was taken aback by the numbers. “I..
