Boom in Borrowing Against Art

Andy Warhol, Dollar Sign

Sotheby’s reports “a tenfold increase” in requests for loans secured by works of art. One reason: collectors’ estates face estate tax deadlines and cannot wait until Sotheby’s auctions resume to liquidate their artworks.

How to Imagine Trillions of Dollars

The Federal Reserve is prepared to lend as much as $4.5 trillion to fight off a depression. Congress may vote to authorize another two or three trillion in financial aid. Getting one’s head around all those trillions isn’t easy.

One way to understand large numbers is to convert them to seconds. If you lived one trillion seconds ago you were back in the stone age.

This old post imagines a stack of $100 bills tall enough to add up to $1.25 trillion. It was 850 miles high! (A stack worth $4.5 trillion would soar over 3,000 miles into the sky. If laid on its side across the U.S., it would stretch from sea to shining sea.)

Here’s a view of $1 trillion in $100 bills. For scale, note the little man at the lower left corner.

References to trillions of dollars are becoming commonplace. Will our grandchildren have to get used to quadrillions?

The $60,000 Estate Tax Exemption Lives On

You thought the punitive $60,000 federal estate tax exemption vanished back in the 1970s? Not entirely. It lives on for foreigners who move assets to the perceived safety of the U.S. but are not domiciled here.

Unless, of course, they hire an ingenious U.S. tax lawyer.