Manhattan apartment for $500K a month

A 4,786-square-foot apartment, a full floor in the Pierre Hotel overlooking Central Park, is now renting for half a million dollars a month. Photo / Thinkstock

An apartment is now renting for half a million dollars a month in Manhattan, The Wall Street Journal reports. The lease is the most expensive ever in New York City.

The 4,786-square-foot apartment, a full floor in the Pierre Hotel overlooking Central Park, has six bedrooms and six and a half bathrooms. Amenities include a Jaguar driven by a chauffeur. The same renter has also leased a guest suite for an additional $150,000 a month.

It would be an error to draw any general conclusions about the finances of the very rich from a single lease in Manhattan. A paper released on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research compares a few strategies for estimating the total wealth of the nation's richest people and finds different methods yield a wide range of results for the past 30 years or so.

Then again, the nationality of the renter is not known. In Russia, where the concentration of wealth has become extreme, only 111 people own about one fifth of the country's capital.

In any case, for anyone concerned about trends in the concentration of wealth, New York's half-million-dollar monthly rental is good news in at least one respect.

One of the real dangers of an increasing concentration of wealth, as economist Larry Summers has written, would be that the rich can't find enough things to spend all their money on. You can only use so many iPads, after all. Instead of spending, the rich would let their wealth pile up. There would be fewer buyers for everything the economy provides, from babysitting to pick-up trucks, and ultimately fewer chances for the lower classes to make a living.

That the 39th floor of the Pierre Hotel has been leased is a sign that the fabulously rich are finding things to spend their money on. So are solid titanium toothbrushes and so many other apparently frivolous goods and services the modern luxury market has invented.

- Bloomberg