This from Taipan Daily:

Damien Hirst creates grotesqueries. Grand statues of pregnant mothers’ intestines… drowned sheep in tanks of blue water… corpses in full wedding regalia lying under a table.

His conflations of birth, love and death have made him the darling of the art world in recent years. As aberrant as it might seem to place a diamond-covered human skull in the lobby of an office building, this sort of odd behavior is actually quite the norm at the peak of an inflationary bubble.

After all, it makes about as much sense to pay $3 million for a “Neimanesque” painting of four rotting skulls as it does to pay $3 million for a two-bedroom condo on Manhattan’s lower West Side. Why the heck not, when the money itself has become as meaningless as the art’s supposed aesthetic or the cachet of the address.

A Chill Breeze…

And then a crash blows through, bringing a bracing chill to the public’s fevered conscience. Suddenly, the idea of spending dollars as fast as one can possibly manage seems remarkably foolish.

And so it is that last week, auctioneers to the overly rich, Phillips de Pury and Co., were completely unable to peddle off Hirst’s “Beautiful Artemis Thor Neptune Odin Delusional Sapphic Inspirational Hypnosis Painting.” In fact, an additional 20 lots enticed no bids whatsoever – this despite all the champagne staffers plied attendees with.

This sudden grim turn is hardly unique to P.d.P’s. Christie’s reports that it was unable to move an equally grotesque self-portrait by Francis Bacon that had been expected to pull down some $40 million.

The Awful Grip of Reality

If I could tell you that this is all simply symptomatic of a long overdue upper-class comeuppance, I surely would. Unfortunately, while this crash may have started in Downtown Manhattan, it is now spreading its clammy fingers throughout the global economy, sparing neither high nor low.

Just last week I was perusing my Bloomberg feed and came across an article describing the alarming increase in shoplifting and pick-pocketing… by elderly Japanese retirees. According to Japan’s Ministry of Justice, the number of petty thefts by this suddenly-bereft cadre have doubled in 2008.

Chuo University’s Masahiro Yamada credits the spike to anxiety over increasing lack of assets and a failing social net. And this in a society famed for its familial loyalty and massive savings rate! One can only imagine the sort of future we have to look forward to here in the States.

How to Turn Wall Street’s Pain Into a Quick 146% Gain!

While current market conditions are treacherous for naive “buy and hold” investors, a small group of smart folks are converting the market slide into gains of 251%… 307%… even 387%… week in and week out… no matter how far the Dow falls. Here’s how you can join them — free — for a full six months!

High Anxiety

We are certainly becoming ever more anxious. Recent polls put the current White House occupant’s approval rating in the low 30s. And The Reuters/University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey is pegged at a 28-year low for the second month in a row.

And for those of you who dismiss such surveys as “utterly disconnected from reality,” I must point out that this one has found alarming traction in the “real world.” Retail sales put in a record breaking collapse in October. Nor was this 2.8% drop but so unique. In fact, sales have fallen in each of the past four months, the first such instance of prolonged retail failure since we began keeping track in 1992.

Needless to say, many of the retailers that comprise the Standard and Poors Consumer Discretionary SPDR (NYSE:XLY) have recalled their more optimistic guidance of a few short months ago, and are now finally warning of hard times ahead.

Capitalizing Fear and Pain

For some, this admission is rather late in coming, seeing as how the XLY has already cut itself in half over the past five months. Fortunately, regular readers of both this and my WaveStrength Options Weekly (WOW) column have been completely prepared for this blow.

Here, I have begged folks for the better part of a year to protect themselves by purging these stocks from their portfolios, while in WOW, I armed readers with put contracts against the weakest players that have garnered gains of approximately 1,873%.

It is NOT too late to do either. First of all, the retail stocks as a whole could still easily cut themselves in half again, as we move through the most “anxious” holiday shopping season in recent memory.

Beyond that, you can capitalize this loss simply by buying a mid-dated, at-the-money put against the XLY itself. My calculations show that a contract of this nature can expect to gain $50 for every additional dollar the retail ETF loses.

Heck, with the gains you might make, you could even buy that dreadful Hirst painting of the skulls and all. And probably at a marked discount to boot.

Source: High Anxiety Strikes New York, Tokyo – and Your Local Mall