I assume most markets are controlled.
The Federal Reserve moves the money supply, and that moves prices. Change what a dollar is worth and you change what every asset is worth. Interest rates, regulation, and at the far end, outright price controls.
Then we call the result “the market.”
They’re not even hiding it. It’s just business.
Baseball cards work the same way.
The Managed Market Of Baseball Cards
The hobby has decided that 1-of-1 cards are the prize. There are a near-infinite number of these oddities, and every one of them is rare on purpose. Meanwhile an old vintage card with a genuinely tiny population gets passed over, because it didn’t come with the right label from a grading company.
That’s artificial scarcity. A card with a piece of a real bat in it, from a player everybody has heard of, sells for less than a card that was manufactured to be rare last Tuesday.
In the real world that’s backwards. If you own a card of someone the public knows and loves, it should be the easier sell.
But it isn’t, because the prices run on feedback loops.
I only learned about buybacks last year. Card companies go out and buy their own old cards, stamp them, and put them back in packs. They manufacture the chase. They pick which players you’re supposed to want.
I don’t know how that’s legal. It is.
Here’s the part that gets me. The online price guides keep slicing the data thinner. A handful of people trading one card back and forth is enough to make it look valuable. Thin markets are easy to move.
So the cards normal people actually want get ignored, because the official collectors aren’t chasing them.
Same trick, smaller table.
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