Printing More Money vs. High Card Prices

[Santo10Fan]

Originally Posted by Leon

I have been wondering about a question I have so thought I would put it out here. If this gets political it will be locked. That is not what is intended. This affects both sides of the aisle.

Do yawl think all of the money being printed by the treasury, and the many trillions being doled out, has anything to do with card prices?

Leon, there were multiple events that happened in the past year that I feel fortuitously mingled to simply get more people involved in the hobby, thereby organically stimulating a market that was undervalued. A hobby that is considered a safe haven by all stripes of investors.

The first round of stimulus back in April was timed right for the hobby because, quite simply, people were stuck in their homes looking for...a hobby! It helped that some in the middle class who never got laid off got $2-4K and maybe bought that Goudey Ruth or Aaron rookie they'd been thinking about for years. Or they bought a 2020 Topps Chrome hobby box. Also, card breakers on Youtube went nuclear because their format was perfect for the pandemic.

Increased media coverage during a historical crossroads may have contributed to the most recent bump, from mid-january to current.

Auction price headlines and the unfortunate and sudden passing of our giant Hank Aaron came right around the same time that a sea of what I propose is "dark" stimulus money was printed: the Gamestop stock cash out. On Feb. 1, this stock crashed and many, many of the sellers made profits. And it's a brand new generation of collectors. The common story I think was that you bought in at $11 and sold at $300. This injected new blood into our hobby because if you look at the timing, I believe it's clear that a lot of that money is now in our hobby.

My theory is this new generation's buying started with mint condition rookie cards of all sports, anything Ruth, then T206 portraits. There's others I'm sure but these were the most noticeable to me. Stuff that had been on ebay for years (e.g. Dean's) was bought at asking price.

Bitcoin reached its all time high back in December, which freed anyone who may have been stuck with it since its last big crash in 2018. If you bought last summer and cashed out there were healthy profits to be made. Its $46,000 per coin as of this writing; in March it was $5K.

In summary, I feel the traditional government stimulus was just one of many reasons new money has found its' way into our hobby. Students of history will recognize the uncanny collision of circumstances that make these moments abstract and somewhat hard to process as they occur. And there is evidence of an overall V-shaped recovery on the horizon which could make a strong bear position attractive to these new collectors.

https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/05/04/br...d-the-pandemic
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NYSE-GME/
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/27/96125...red-in-atlanta
https://www.tmz.com/2020/12/17/kurt-...-million-rare/
https://www.tmz.com/2021/01/14/micke...n-sets-record/
https://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_nkw..._cards&_sop=16
https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/b...omic-boom.html