It's amazing what rich people with time on their hands will buy. Or maybe that should be rich people without time on their hands.

For years, a Rolex was one of the opulent symbols of wealth, an expensive timepiece that you wore on your arm as much to see the hour as to indicate your own financial power. But status, like time, does not stand still and the very newest indication that you have money to burn involves a similar product you may not believe.

It's an expensive item from a Swiss watchmaker called Romain Jerome and it's worth a staggering $300,000. But what may be even more unusual about this beyond expensive piece of work is this - it doesn't actually tell you the time.

Yep, folks with money to burn are snapping up the model called the " Day and Night" watch with abandon, and the original shipment sold out in less than 48 hours. The watch doesn't say anything as lowbrow as the hour, the minute or the second. Instead, this fancy bauble merely indicates whether it's day or night, in case your butler is too busy to go peek outside the window and come back to tell you.

But experts contend this is nothing new. "When you ask people what is the ultimate luxury, 80 percent answer 'time'. Then when you look at other studies, 67 percent don't look at their watch to tell what time it is," Romain Jerome's Yvan Arpa explains.

And that isn't even the most expensive item in their inventory. Their " Titanic DNA" watch (demonstrated by Arpa, top left) is made from the steel and coal of the legendary ship, which sunk in 1912. Some versions go for as much as $500,000.

But because of the corrosive effect of the years under water, you're not supposed to actually expose it to the air - which means it should never actually be worn.

"Why do people buy expensive watches?" Arpa asks rhetorically. "To have a trophy. A watch (costing) $9 gives the time as well as a watch at $500,000, so they really buy a trophy."

Chanel is also offering a watch of its own for the well to do. They can hardly keep the " J12 18 place Vendome" model in stock. It runs $864,100. Well, it actually it runs by the hour but for that price it should not only be running, but jumping, skipping, hopping, completing the decathlon and performing brain surgery.

You might think hard times and the fact the world seems to be heading into a recession would be enough to stop this trend, but the economy takes a licking and these watch sales keep on ticking. The demand remains strong from buyers in the U.S., Asia and the Middle East.

"During a crisis, people have another level of consciousness. It doesn't mean that they will not buy, it is just that they are looking more carefully at what they buy," notes Emmanuel Raffner of Swiss watchmaker La Montre Hermes.

Which means time isn't running out on the very rich. If they can even tell what time it really is.

Photo credit: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images