Recently a UK retailer announced a growth in sales profit now other reports from US suggest that sales in the art market are exceeding expectations, suggesting there is at least one class of investments so far untroubled by credit crunch and the US economic slowdown.

Sotheby’s, the auction house, had its biggest ever sale by dollar value last month, selling $362m worth of contemporary works in New York, including a 1976 painting by Francis Bacon, “Triptych, 1976”, for $86m. The price was the highest ever paid for a contemporary work at auction.

A sale of contemporary art at Christie’s in the same week generated $348m, including $33.6m for Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping”, a new record for the work of a living artist. According to reports by the Financial Times, the contemporary sales followed solid Impressionist and modern auctions the previous week. Christie’s sold Claude Monet’s “Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil” for $41.4m, easily surpassing the previous record of $35m for a Monet set just last year.

FT says that the two main auction houses sold nearly $2bn in artworks during two weeks in May – about 25% more than in the same period last year. Sotheby’s and Christie’s each hold about 600 auctions a year but the most expensive works usually sell during the May and November auctions in New York.

The rise of “superclass” of rich people is becoming an increasingly contentious issue, according to the results of an FT/Harris poll. Strong majorities in five European countries ranging from 76% in Spain to 87% in Germany – considered that income inequality was too great. But 78% of respondents in the US, traditionally seen as more tolerant of income inequality, also thought the gap was too wide.

Reports suggest that this was the first time, the FT/Harris poll surveyed opinion in Asia. In China, 80% of respondents thought income inequality was too great, while Japan recorded the lowest figure of all countries surveyed, with 64%.

According to the study, significant majorities in all eight countries thought that income inequality would widen even more over the next five years. And clear majorities in all countries agreed that taxes should be raised on the rich and lowered on the poor.

However, in the UK, 74% thought that those on low incomes should be taxed less. A United National Development Programme report in 2005 estimated that the world’s richest 50 people were earning more than the 416m poorest.

The woes of the world economy are having a more direct impact on wealthy home buyers in the UK, who are finding mainstream mortgage lenders less willing to accommodate them. Enter private banks, such as Coutts and the private arms of HSBC and UBS, which have traditionally been small players in the mortgage market. They are now reporting an increase in lending of mortgages even as their high street competitors tighten their lending criteria.

According to FT, private banks have not had to adjust their pricing and underwriting guidelines as much as mainstream lenders. They aim to build a close relationship with clients and have good knowledge of their finances, so even larger loans are not necessarily deemed high-risk. Additionally, the private banks have not had to introduce broad risk controls, such as maximum loan sizes. In fact, they tend to have minimum, rather than maximum, loan restrictions.