Will this stock market madness affect cards?

[seanofjapan]

This does kind of feel like a debate about where the deck chairs should be placed on the Titanic.

A few auction results that happened this week are pretty irrelevant. There is a massive sword hanging over the head of the world economy right now and that is what is going to determine card values are by the end of this year.

The problem is that we don't know how long the economically disruptive countermeasures to control the Coronavirus are going to be necessary.

Most major companies can withstand a shutdown of a few weeks at most. So if this thing improves significantly by next month we might get out of this OK and your cards might not take much of a hit. But if it drags on into the summer like some are now suggesting it will, most businesses can't survive that long and bankruptcies will explode, making the economic chaos we are witnessing now seem relatively mild.

The entire airline industry is already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and will probably be wiped out completely in a few weeks if governments worldwide don't bail them out. There are a lot of other sectors out there similarily vulnerable lined up to follow, way too many for governments to be able to keep them all afloat with bailouts.

If that happens card values are going to be destroyed just like the value of every other kind of investment.

So lets hope it doesn't come to that.