Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
I guess the good news is much of this may be moot when the hobby moves on to counterfeits so good they can't be detected. Then the name of the game will be to alter cards to make them look worse, to ward off any suspicion they just look too nice for what they are.
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Actually reminds me of a story about pearls (and a trade, since we all love a good trade) from a recent WSJ article.
Relevant bits here:
In 1917, Maisie Plant, the young wife of a rich businessman, couldn’t stop admiring a magnificent double strand of pearls from Cartier. The Parisian jeweler was looking for a U.S. headquarters in New York. Pierre Cartier offered to swap the necklace, priced at $1 million, for the Plants’ mansion on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street in Manhattan. Maisie’s husband, Morton, promptly agreed to the trade.
What happened afterward is a cautionary tale.
Why would an industrial baron like Morton Plant—with vast holdings in railroads, steamships and hotels—trade his elegant mansion for a few shiny lumps that came out of an oyster?
For millennia, pearls had been prized around the world and were often more valuable than gold or even diamonds. In 1917, the $1 million the Cartier pearls fetched was worth at least $24 million in today’s money.
What neither Plant nor Cartier could know was that just months earlier, Japanese entrepreneur Kokichi Mikimoto had industrialized the technology to create cultured pearls.
Mikimoto was soon mass-producing them. The price of natural pearls began collapsing in the 1920s and stayed down for decades.
In 1957, after Maisie died, her Cartier necklace sold at auction for $151,000.
In recent years prices for the finest natural pearls have rebounded. In 2015, a Cartier pearl necklace comparable to Maisie Plant’s sold at a Sotheby’s auction in Geneva for about $7 million.
Even so, that’s about one-third of the price of the Plant necklace in 1917, adjusted for inflation.
Cartier got the much better end of that pearls-for-real-estate swap. In 2016, a comparably sized, less-renowned property two blocks up Fifth Avenue from the landmark Cartier building sold for $525 million.