Thursday, June 09, 2011

Comic Books and Economic Realities

Back in high school, I was a serious collector of comic books. Financial problems for the family compelled me to sell off my collection for a pittance in 1987 and that always haunted me.  But after reading this article at The Weekly Standard, I don’t feel so bad now.

It is a very good article on the perils of speculation and what happens when the bubble bursts. The lessons of it apply to many types of industries and even government programs.  Loose credit is a dangerous thing when it artificially boosts business with nothing concrete to back it up. 

The money quote of the article:

As painful as it was for some of us, the comic-book bubble teaches two important lessons. First, bubble-mania is not always the fault of buyers and sellers. Sometimes it’s caused by intermediaries. Second, sometimes markets don’t “come back.” People who owned blue-chip comics took a hit in 1993. People who owned modern-era comics were wiped out, the value of their collections never to return.

That’s something to keep in mind. The same thing happened to baseball card collectors around the same time period. As mentioned, housing may see the same results and that will take a lot of banks down – not to mention people’s futures. Go read the whole article.

Oh and I had that #1 issue of The New Teen Titans too.

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