When You Have More Money Than Exist Things To Buy

Recently, a Jeff Koons balloon sculpture sold for 91 million dollars, setting a record for the highest price for a work of art by a living artist. It reminded me of a film I recently saw, on a flight back from Los Angeles.

Entitled "The Price of Everything," the filmmakers managed to interview many of the artists, buyers, and dealers involved in the contemporary art market. And it didn't take very much to realize what was going on. Basically, the super-rich are so rich that they've run out of things to buy. Literally. They've bought all (and I mean ALL) of the real estate in the world, transforming places like NYC, London, Hong Kong, etc. from actual cities into little more than pieces of their financial portfolios. And in running out of real estate to buy, they moved on to art, driving prices into the stratosphere by bidding against one another because they're each desperate to buy something - anything - that might go up in value.

For all our talk about inequality, I still don't think we've fathomed just how rich our current crop of super-rich really are. But imagine how rich you need to be in order to have so much money that you've run out of investments to buy. So, you're sitting on this massive trove of wealth, but you're desperate for things to invest in, because you already own everything. So, you start buying art, believing that, like real estate, it's a safe and lucrative place to park your money. But again, you're only doing so because you not only have too much money by an moral or political standard, but you have too much money by any conventional economic standard, because you have more money than exist things to buy.

So, on one end, inequality means that we're each increasingly struggling to come up with the money to buy the things that we need. But, on the other end, a handful of people are struggling to come up with things to buy for all the money that they have.