next bubble "art" / economist

excess liquidity.... next stop art. i think its probably a better way to spend and speculate than in real estate in places like florida etc.....

immer wieder geht alles auf die vorherrschende liquiditätsschwemme zurück. warum also nicht kunst (immer noch besser als zum beispiel immobilien in florida etc...)

Easy money is pouring into the modern-art world

ARTISTS have often been celebrated for their rakish ways, but it is investors in art who these days are living dangerously. In 2006 the market for modern and contemporary art had a record-breaking year. New York's autumn auctions of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art raised more than $1 billion. A portrait by Gustav Klimt, a Picasso painting and one of Jackson Pollock's largest drip paintings each fetched as much as $130m.

China is the latest darling. Sotheby's and Christie's, the biggest fine-art auction houses, sold $190m of Asian contemporary art, most of it Chinese, in 2006, up from $22m just two years before.....

With so much money sloshing around the art world, it's not just cynical realists who worry that the market is overheating.

....Mr Moses points to a five-year compound annual growth rate of above 20%; the last time this happened was in the frenzied years of 1985 to 1990. Though he does not believe a crash is imminent, he notes that when that bubble burst the Mei Moses index dropped by over 60% in the five following years.

Three forces are driving prices higher, says Karl Schweizer, head of art banking at UBS, a Swiss bank. The rich are getting richer, they are more comfortable with alternative assets such as art and there is a shortage of supply—few “classic” modern artists (who worked from 1870 to 1950) and post-war artists have produced work of lasting value......

The market is overcrowded. But the potential for speculative gains is irresistible to some would-be connoisseurs.

Many believe prices will continue to rise. Investors come from further afield than before, and they have very deep pockets. Whereas Japanese investors mainly bought French Impressionists in the late 1980s, today's emerging buyers from places such as Russia, China and Latin America have more eclectic tastes.

Art is not the only inflated asset class, either. Global liquidity is such that money is pouring into any investment with the potential to produce a quick return. If liquidity dries up, art is unlikely to fare any better than stocks or bonds.