The recent run up of the stock market has me worried. Then the New York Times has been running articles about the rich buying up hard assets (real estate, paintings, antiques, precious stones). It seems that the rich are wary too. I know that interest rates are low, so the people go looking for other investments. Yet, when an emerald appreciated 450% in 10 years, this gives me pause-are we about to see a market crash? Do the rich know something we don’t?:eek:
What it portends is that speculation in art and precious gems should be left to rich people (as it historically has always been) who can afford the loss if the market tanks.
It portends that there’s a ridiculous amount of money sloshing around at the top. They can’t invest it all in stocks because the value of a stock is still tethered to a company’s capacity to function in the normal economy. However, they can use it to inflate a big speculative bubble on hard assets.
It’s one more data point, by the way, on why the whole “job creator”/“trickle down” idea is stupid. If you let rich people kept more of their money they don’t use it to fuel the economy in productive ways. They just buy more emeralds and drive the price through the roof.
The shroud of the dark side has fallen, begun the class war has.
It’s not like there’s a secret rich guy mailing list that you get added to when your net worth exceeds $X million. “Total currency collapse next month! Buy hard assets!”
Inasmuch as “the rich” exist as a monlithic group (they kinda don’t), the ones who are not personal finance wizards hire advisors and/or follow their peers. People who are worth a shit ton of tend to do different and more complicated things with their money than the rest of us.
No need to imagine a conspiracy when a combination of fashion-following and investment strategy will suffice.
What about all the extra emerald mining jobs? I kid, I kid.
It means, at least in part, that sales of such items at auction have finally, after a 20 year decline, shown signs of maybe, just maybe, turning around so that buying at auction now can once again be a sound investment. Maybe.
Since 2008 125% of all new income has gone to the top 1% (not only did they get all the new income, everyone else’s income went down and they got that too). They literally have more money than they know what to do with so the price of extravagant status symbols goes up.
I would love to see a cite for this statistic.
nvm.
Actually it’s 500% of all new income that went to the top 1% (all the new income plus income drops for the 99% plus income from the dead who no longer earn wages, and all the money that goes up in smoke when the stock market implodes and retirement accounts plunge in value.
The 1% have it all, which is why nude paintings of Bea Arthur are worth fabulous sums of money. 
:eek:
:smack:
My remembered number was close. This says that from 2009-2011 the top 1% got 121% of income gains.