Bloomberg just did a great interactive piece covering 2017. There are some key points that stuck out to me:
More money went into startups in 2017 than any other year in history. SoftBank certainly led the way with huge investments in already established startups and Theranos receiving a huge end of year investment. 2017's total was $141.3 Billion invested in startups. 2016 investments paired with 2015 investments. In January of 2016 when I sat in on meetings at Battery Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock Partners they all said that they were getting back to basics on VC investments. Take it FWIW.
Hong Kong has the highest real estate prices in the world and they continued to climb while their unemplyment continued to dip to only 3.0% where Japan has 2.8% unemployment followed by the US and Isreal at 4.1%, United Kingdom at 4.3% and Germany at it's lowest level since reunification. Apollo Golbal raised 24.6 billion dollars for the largest fund ever.
Student Loans have now exceeded the total size of U.S. High yield corporate market. This is a catch 20/20. Education costs continue to rise so there should be a rise in student loans which has continiously risen since 2005. This also equates to more students in school which is a positive thing IMO. More education typically = better society right?
Art market continues to reach new highs. Salvator Mundi sells for a record $450.3 million dollars at auction. Price was actually 400 Million combined with a 50 million dollar auction house fee. Off the top of my head this was sold to the Louve in Abu Dhabi. The total cost to build this museum was less than the cost of the one painting. The naming rights however are even more than the cost to build the museum. So what is art? Is it a name and recognition? The most expensive piece of art in the world is the Mona Lisa. The auction house did a fantastic job marketing this as the second Mona Lisa and when you have a piece on display for the next 100 years and people flock at $60.000 a ticket to go and see the second Mona Lisa the return on investment and name that the 2nd Louve has made for itself tends to make sense.
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