Food for thought on the current boom market

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by JustinD

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.

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.