[raulus]

They'll go up. And if they don't go up, they'll go down.

Or maybe they'll do a little of both at the same time.

Might also depend on how severe the recession is.

Not to mention what else is going on with other asset prices.

Certainly if enough things go wrong with the broader economy, then we could see cardboard demand wane, the number of sellers could wax, and prices would therefore fall, no more exciting than a simple flip of supply and demand.

Naturally, right now, due to our recency bias, it's hard to imagine this ever happening. But I understand that it's happened in the past, and could always happen again in the future.

If you're dying to really look at historical results, go back and check out prices for a handful of items for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. Check out a single item at a specific grade. Nothing too exotic - make sure there's a lot of transactions so that you can get a good feel for the market from year to year before the recession, into the recession, and then coming out of it. Do it for a few different items for different players and different years, different sets, just so you don't get weird results by focusing on only one player, only one set, only one year. Since the great recession is our last recession (ignoring the COVID 2020 quickie recession), that's probably going to be your best bet for trying to assess the action during a recession, simply because good data on cardboard prices during the 2001 recession is hard to come by, and before that it's even harder.