There are some unusual correlations in the study of politics, and the Los Angeles Times reports a curious one: the relationship between art prices and income inequality. The correlation is not surprising, but I did not suspect that it would be so strong. A team of economists at the Yale School of Management found that a “one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1% triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 percent.” The saddest part of this understanding is that the sale of art very rarely employs many people, least of all the artist who is usually dead when the sale is made.
In his “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx observed that Hegel pointed out that history repeats itself. Marx developed the point further: history does repeat itself, but “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx certainly was on target describing the behavior of big banks in the US. One would think that the near-collapse of the world financial system (and the demise of two major banks, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns) in 2008 would make big banks less likely to take risks. Today, however, we learned that JP Morgan lost nearly $2 billion on trades that were extremely risky. Let’s hope that these losses do not trigger a chain reaction in world markets.
World Politics News 
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