$450,000,000!
That's a lot of money to spend on a painting and yet another justification for my daughter to go to art school! It just goes to show you how rich the rich are gettin as the previous record for a painting at auction was $300M for Kooning's "Interchange" 2 years ago and this painting was previously purchased in 2013 for "only" $127.5M – how's that for inflation? So, on this trajectory, we're only a few years away from the first Billion-Dollar painting – just in time for Madeline to graduate with her art degree!
The buyer is mystery but look for a guy with a 26" space on his wall – that's probably him. That's right, this is a pretty small painting but it is cool that it was painted by DaVinci 500 years ago though how they prove that, I can't say. There was a VanGough that went for "only" $81.3M that I liked better – and it's more in my price range.
This is an indicator of how drastic income inequality is becomming in the US. There was a roomful of people yesterday, bidding hundreds of Millions of Dollars on a painting while their pet Congresspeople are screaming to the cameras that these art lovers need massive tax breaks in order to "create jobs". In order to give the art lovers these tax breaks, we have to give up our nacent universal health insurance, we have to cut Medicare, cut Student Loan Funding and cut Farm Subsides – all while taking on $1,500,000,000,000 in additional debt (minimum), which is enough money to buy 3,000 more paintings!
Going long Sothebey's (BID) might be the best way to play along at home because all this money we, The People are scrificing is going to just 3M of our fellow citizens in the Top 1% and this chart is old as they now control 50% of the wealth in this country – and guess where they took the other 10% from?
That extra blob of green on the chart is what was cut off from the top of the top 90% and it belongs to the Top 97, 98 and 99th percentiles and yes, a…
