Vladimir Putin says he wants “a new architecture” for the world.

What?

Bauhaus? Arts and crafts? Frank Lloyd Wright?

He means he is sick of U.S. hegemony. He would prefer that the world economy not be dominated by the dollar and that world politics not be under the thumb of the Pentagon.

He speaks for the Chinese, no doubt, and for the French, the Arabs...and many others.

And guess what. He will get his wish.

Wealth and power are migrating, as Dan Denning puts it, from the West to the East. Growth rates are faster in the East...taxes are lower...and ‘legacy costs’ - pensions to unionized workers, for example - barely exist. Cash piles up in the hands of the Chinese, for example, at the rate of billions per week. Meanwhile, in the U.S.A, cash leaves the country on a one-way ticket. The trade deficit sucks out $2 billion per day. The interest on the U.S. federal debt totes to over $8 trillion, with interest payments of over $1 billion a day (much of it paid to foreigners). Just those two items alone add up to more than $1 trillion per year.

But wait, you say; doesn’t the money come back to the United States - as the foreigners recycle it into U.S. Treasury bonds and other U.S. investments? Yes, much of it does. But it comes back wearing funny clothes and speaking a strange accent. It leaves as an asset - and comes back as a liability! For now, it is no longer something that makes Americans richer; instead the returned dollars are a measure of our poverty. It is as if got on the plane like an old friend - and came back a slave master. Now, we work to pay it interest and dividends.

What Mr. Putin wants, Mr. Putin will get. Eventually. But not yet. Yesterday, the Dow rose like it meant business. The dollar went up too. And over in China, born-yesterday investors still expect prices to rise today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. The Shanghai index is on the rise, again.

In fact, as near as we can tell, the whole Global Bubble...the first one in world history...is still expanding. But watch out - it could explode at any minute.

Is the art market a leading indicator of this Global Bubble? Or a lagging one?

We don’t know. We watch it for amusement, not for trading signals. And next week, another big art auction should set off giggles.

Would you like to spend millions for a big picture of a dollar sign? How about a big, telescoping geometric pattern? Well, then, get out your wallet, dear reader, because next week both Sotheby’s and Christie’s are set to make history - competing auctions will tell us not only how big bonuses in the financial industry have become, but how batty buyers in the art market can be.

Damien Hirst has a steel cabinet with 6,000 painted pills in it. He calls it Lullaby Spring. Don’t miss that one, dear reader. It’s expected to fetch $8 million. Bacon, Freud - all of the hustlers of the art world will be on display. And it’s too bad Andy Warhol is dead. Wouldn’t he get a laugh out of seeing his portraits of Marilyn Monroe go on the block! His three prints of Marilyn - cleverly entitled “Three Marilyns” - are expected to bring in $14 million.

It is merely laughable that someone would judge this kind of stuff so highly. But it is intriguing that they judge it so much more valuable than it was a few years ago. The inflation in contemporary art is breathtaking; it illustrates how nouveau and how riche the nouveau riche really are.

Indians, Russians, Chinese - not to mention Americans and Englishmen - they are all throwing their money around like people who just got rich...and got rich so easily they don’t know the value of it. What to make of it?

Cash and credit is incredibly easy to come by, we conclude. There’s so much of it around, people seem desperate to get rid of it.

We have a suggestion for them. Just hold on. A credit expansion is always followed by a credit contraction. And this credit expansion has led to the world’s first, and biggest, planetary bubble.

When it corrects, it will be the world’s first, and biggest, planetary bust. So keep your eyes on our Crash Alert flag, dear reader. We may be early. But we won’t be wrong.

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing. For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.