Quote:
Originally Posted by seanofjapan
Its interesting to see the sheer volume of stuff coming up for sale. Personally I view the post-war market as having a huge sword hanging over its head in the form of the demographics of the hobby. Prices probably won`t come down in the near future but in the next 10-20 years I think they will go down by quite a lot.
The bulk of demand for post-war stuff originated with the baby boom generation reaching adulthood in the 70s and 80s and purchasing cards from their childhood. Its probably safe to say that the vast majority of post-war card "wealth" in the market is in the hands of people from that generation (who are most likely to both have the financial means and personal interest in going after it. Of course there are younger collectors too but in terms of numbers that gen dominates).
The problem for post-war prices (as I see it anyway) is that the early baby boom generation is now entering its 70s and within the next couple of decades its entirely predictable that a huge volume of post-war cards are going to be entering the estates of those collectors as they pass on.
The mass dumping of vintage cards in the form of estate sales has never swamped the baseball card market before because it has never had an entire generation of collectors pass away (at least in the modern hobby). Of course estate sales already happen with baseball cards, but the scale of that is going to skyrocket once the boomers start to pass away. If you look at older hobbies like stamps where they`ve had this sort of thing happen, it leads to huge price corrections.
You also have the double whammy of not just the increase in supply (via estate sales) but also a decrease in demand for that specific era since the boomers are the last generation who remember seeing Mantle, Mays, Aaron, etc play and a lot of the value of those cards are specifically tied to the fact that they are the cards that boomers collected as kids. For millenials, names like Aaron, Mantle and Mays mean about as much as names like Johnson, Mathewson and Lajoie mean to the boomers - vaguely familiar if they are average baseball fans but not much more.
Given the fact that post-war stuff is so much more plentiful than pre-war stuff, and that demand for those cards will likely recede to the same as for pre-war as the "name recognition" factor of the stars reverts back to normal I would expect the prices of that stuff to be much much lower 20 years from now than they are today.
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It's an interesting hypothesis, but I'm not so sure it will come to pass. As the baby boomers expire, there is bound to be a proportionate increase in the supply of prewar cards as well as postwar. Demand is not so easy to forecast either, because collectors don't just gravitate to cards of players they are familiar with. After all, the baby boomers are loaded with cards of Ruth, Gehrig, Ty, Christy, and Walter, all players they never saw play. So the legends, I think, will always be in demand, regardless of the era.