While the economy and peoples available spending money are certainly a factor I think a large part of it is also a maturing of the hobby.
At one time nearly everything was "inexpensive" witht the exception of a few cards that had something extra going for them. The Wagner, 52 Mantle, Fleer Wiliams #68, stuff like that.
The next phase around mid 80's was a rush toward star and rookie cards as investments. But without understanding why a rookie card might be more valuable.
By the late 80's early 90's every card was seen as valuable, and manufacturers could sell as much as they could print. Everything became hype and image. Except for prewar, which stayed pretty solid and grew very well. Largely because all prewar cards were seen as "rare" or at least hard to find.
Mid 90's manufacturers cut back on production of any particular set, but produced a fast array of sets. Prewar still did well in a somewhat failing market because things were still percieved as being harder to find.
Things slid from there to where we are today, and a lot of the slide for modern stuff is the "Ebay effect" where before you might go to flea markets for a year and not find much that wasn't brand new, now you could go on Ebay and see just how many of anything were actually out there. And for nearly everything the answer was plenty. So modern stuff suffered. If you're not pickyabout condition, nearly any mainstream set can be had with a few mouse clicks.
I think the lower prices for low and mid grade prewar is an extension of that. For a brief time the sense that 33 goudeys and diamond stars etc were uncommon persisted. But people are finally noticing that a large group of prewar cards aren't really all that tough in lower grades. And for most people, if you can buy a particular card pretty much any time you want they'll wait for a deal. Which will lower the price.
The stuff that's actually hard to find may suffer a bit temporarily, but when it does come back, I think we'll see some very impressive prices even for "commons"
I'm partly comparing this hobby "maturity" to already mature hobbies like Stamps and coins, all of which were well developed a long time ago. In US stamps there's very little produced after about 1930 that isn't very cheap. And a lot that was produced before 1930 that's also cheap. And the prices for the common stuff is very static. But the truly difficult items and the difficult and popular items are expensive and likely to get more expensive.
Steve B
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