After several years of soaring house prices, U.S. homeowners are sitting on a record mountain of wealth.

Why it matters: The economy looks pretty great for Americans who own their own homes — that's nearly 66% of the population!

Driving the news: Homeowners with mortgages hold just under $17 trillion in equity, a record high, per a report out this week from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).

Zoom in: A record $11 trillion of home equity is "tappable," meaning homeowners can borrow against it while maintaining at least 20% equity in the house, per the report, which looks at data from March.

• About 48 million folks have access to tappable equity, with an average of $206,000 per mortgage holder.

The big picture: The American dream of homeownership, where you snag a 30-year mortgage and step onto the wealth-building ladder, is kind of dead at the moment — unless you've already bought a home.

• Wealth overall has soared in the U.S. since the pandemic, in part because of increasing home and stock prices.

Zoom out: Rising asset prices — both stocks and housing — make consumers feel pretty good. That wealth effect is likely helping to keep consumer spending numbers healthy.

Meanwhile, because of rising mortgage rates and still-increasing home prices, buying a house is increasingly out of reach for first-time buyers.

• It now requires 36% of the median household income to purchase a median-priced home, the ICE report notes. (30% is considered affordable.)
• There's still a shortage of homes to buy, and that's keeping prices elevated. There were 20% fewer home listings in March compared to what was typical in 2017-2019.
• Nearly three-quarters of renters said they believe it would be somewhat or very difficult to obtain a mortgage — up from about half in 2021, as Axios Macro reported earlier this week.

What they're saying: "[T]he continued strength of the economy has made it harder to afford a home and widened the real-estate wealth gap between rich and poor Americans," Redfin senior economist Elijah de la Campa said in a recent housing report.

The bottom line: Homeowners are getting richer and renters are getting left behind.

Axios editor Dan Primack spent a day this week among the masters of the universe at the annual Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles and walked away with one overriding thought: Most everyone was quite satisfied with the current state of affairs.

The big picture: Yes, there were mentions of Israel/Gaza, Ukraine/Russia, climate change, national debt, and the growing toxicity of domestic politics.

• But most of it was said as a perfunctory aside — almost as if it was done more for the sake of being polite than of being real.

State of play: These are the people who have internalized the economic data that the Biden administration keeps trying to highlight, without being stung much by inflation.

Behind the scenes: Sure, some of this was people talking their book to a reporter.

The bottom line: Positivity was palpable. Not just because almost everyone there is fabulously wealthy, but because they sincerely expect to get even richer in the year ahead.

Auction prices are the most transparent and reliable way to find out the value of an artist's work. But as Katya Kazakina reports for Artnet, they can also be highly misleading.

Why it matters: In general, auction prices tend to overstate the strength of the art market, thanks to survivorship bias — how auction houses gravitate toward the hottest artists. Sometimes, however, the bias can lean the other way.

Driving the news: Kazakina notes that while artist Sterling Ruby's newest works are selling for $550,000 each, one of his more celebrated earlier paintings is coming up for auction with an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000, and in general Ruby's auction prices have been disappointingly low over the past couple of years.

By the numbers: Ruby's auction record of $1.8 million was set in May 2013. That's more than all 39 Ruby works that were sold at auction in 2023, combined.

• Ruby's most recent item to come up for auction, a sculpture called "Snake," failed to sell at Phillips in London even at a low estimate of £15,000 ($18,000).

Between the lines: While most works consigned to auction come as a result of the "three Ds" (death, debt, divorce), a lot of Sterling Ruby pieces are simply unwanted.

• They're what Kazakina groups as "ashtrays, collages, and resin sculptures" — lesser works that were bought by collectors not because they particularly wanted them, but because they understood that buying such pieces was necessary if they wanted to be able to buy one of Ruby's in-demand paintings.
• When Ruby moved galleries, however, as he did many times, all the goodwill earned by buying smaller works was worth nothing, and those pieces ended up at auction.

The bottom line: Artists and their dealers are understandably focused on the primary market — where both of them make money. That can remain healthy even when the secondary market is very weak.