Food for thought on the current boom market
 

I was just pondering something and I was wondering others opinion on it, no judgement zone on your thoughts.

The reason for the exponential boom in some issues has been a subject of debate lately with many theories from secret conglomerates, buying consortium's with goals of market manipulation and just dumb luck. I just had a much more simple thought.

In the 80's and 90's those looking to clean a large stash of illegal money would turn to the real estate market. They would buy homes for 400-500k, put a down payment of 425K down and get a small mortgage to legitimize the transaction. The DEA and IRS got wise to this and slid precautions in the anti-terrorism acts to make consumers prove the record of large cash transactions in their bank accounts and make "mattress" cash illegal to use for down payments in real estate deals. If you have completed a mortgage in the past several years, you may have wondered why the mortgage company wanted to trace the path of your down payment or cash to close. Simple answer...they have to.

In the recent past there are numerous records of laundering in collectibles like art, comic books and recently sports collectibles. Much like the autograph laundering scheme in 2014 that Drew Max was involved in.

Would it not make sense that this would work like a charm right now in a lightly regulated business whereas someone pays 150k in dirty cash for a 52 mantle and then flips it in less than 60 days often uncaring at a loss and now having a clean deposit record with a bill of sale? Can this be part of the explanation for cards turning up in auctions or on ebay weeks or even days after a sale? If there was a group of folks laundering cash they would absolutely care less what they were paying for it, actually the more the better. In fact if they had ghost buyers snapping it up at the inflated price thus just turning money they have two-fold it would be even better.

If I was the IRS, I would be questioning these things.

Sorry to throw another x-files conspiracy out there, it was just my deep-thought moment of the day. :D

Ya know..... If you are a drug dealer and want to clean your cash, you could find worse (and pricier) ways to do it. Not a terrible theory.


It probably isn't that (I tend to lean towards investors seeing market opportunity and hoping to get in and out before the bubble bursts while flipping cards for profit) But it isn't as screwy an idea as you may think.

I would like to see a chart of the last year sales on all the 52 Topps Mantle.

Just my 2 cents: I don`t know how effective a strategy this would be for laundering money - I think if you are a criminal you would ideally want to create a paper trail that indicated the money came from a legitimate source (such as by setting up a dummy legit business that handled a large volume of small fictitious transactions that it would be difficult to prove were fictitious. Like the Car Wash business in the TV show Breaking Bad). With baseball cards you wouldn`t be able to do that too effectively since the IRS (and other authorities) would want to know how you came to suddenly have a 100K$ baseball card lying around to sell.

Even if there are some people doing it though I don`t think it would be significant enough to explain the current state of the market. My guess is that a lot of it is just rich people parking their money in cards (and art, etc) because they view it as a way of diversifying their investment portfolios.

without my (perhaps twisted?) habit of annotating individual observations, IMO there's a boatload of rationale/sense in your way of thinking/communicating - stranger things have happened, and in NO WAY do I view your commentary as pie-in-the-sky/out-of-the-question...NOT that you've solicited my personal opinion, of course, but I certainly concur with the well-thought-out theories as
presented in your post.

much appreciation for your personal - and thoughtful - take on an issue/the issues re: the current state of this hobby/industry.

again, well thought out, and - "X-files" conspiracy theorists/detractors be damned - well-done!

thanks, JustinD for your excellent - and - IMO - accurate - commentary/points of view.

regards,
DS

Too bad the current "boom market" hasn't infiltrated the Negro League baseball collecting segment of the hobby :D

There was a guy in nj doing this a few years back . I think we was selling fake autos and buying real cards or something like that .

Several years ago there was a trust fund baby who was a fairly regular customer at my shop. He would buy very nice stuff. Later found out that he would sell it in a neighboring state at a loss (but since it was all "free money") to buy drugs for a raging coke habit. I always sort of wondered what happened to the nice cards he bought from me and while I don't really have a right to complain as he paid what I was asking for the cards, I somehow feel a little cheated or at least used.