Saturday, July 06, 2019
It's all derivatives now
Cited by the Tesla skeptics...
Deloitte, an accounting firm, estimates that the outstanding value of loans against art in America reached $17bn-20bn in 2017, up 13% from the previous year. Industry insiders say such lending has continued to grow at double-digit rates since then. “Ten or 20 years ago it never crossed your mind to leverage your art collection. But the word is out now,” says Evan Beard of Bank of America Private Bank, the institution with the highest outstanding value of art-secured loans. As interest rates have fallen, borrowing has become more attractive. Open public registers make it easy to check if art is encumbered. Price estimates and auction results available online since the early 2000s have made underwriting easier. In America collectors can even keep encumbered art on their wall.Pawned paintings used to be a mark of faded genteel aristocracy, not a mark of satanic fuckheads. As I wrote earlier in a similar context:
EW Marland, who sacrificed part of his own wealth to cultivate Ponca, had a huge collection of paintings in his mansion. After JP Morgan bought him out, he lost gumption and frittered away his investments. He died nearly broke. His younger wife Lydie was loyal to the manor and the name. For a while after EW died, she wandered the country living on the kindness of strangers, frequently pawning and redeeming the one painting she had kept. Late in life she returned home, and the Roman convent that owned the mansion allowed her to live out her last years in the gatehouse. In Poncan myth, Lydie's pawned painting was the distilled soul of the noble lord. Now a rich idiot casually buys one random painting for the same price as all the houses in Ponca.Paintings used to be esteemed as real value, the result of trained and practiced talent. Now paintings, like everything else, are just tools for arbitrary arbitrage.
Labels: skill-estate
¶ 3:31 PM
