[meteorite-list] Meteorites that can't get any, Casper the frendly theif, and a deeply stupid article

From: Don Rawlings <psc2410xi_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:49:59 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <541024.43466.qm_at_web59305.mail.re1.yahoo.com>

Just consider the source of the meteorite section of this article....Michael Casper. To quote a comic book hero..."nuff said"

Don Rawlings


--- On Wed, 10/22/08, Darren Garrison <cynapse at charter.net> wrote:

> From: Darren Garrison <cynapse at charter.net>
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Meteorites that can't get any, Casper the frendly theif, and a deeply stupid article
> To: Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2008, 12:37 PM
> http://www.forbes.com/markets/2008/10/21/comic-book-bubbles-markets-bubbles08-cx_ds_1021tiny.html
>
> Tyrannosaurs And Superheroes
> David Serchuk, 10.21.08, 6:00 PM ET
>
> The meteorite market has crashed to Earth, and will never
> reach the heights
> again.
>
> In the late 1990s, during the great meteorite bubble, a
> gram of material from
> the Martian Zagami meteorite could go for $2,000. Today it
> fetches $200. The
> Christy's auction house sold a tenth of a gram of lunar
> rock for several hundred
> thousand dollars. Today lunar material fetches $400 a gram.
>
> What happened? What always seems to happen in a bubble:
> Demand lead to
> speculative hoarding, which lead to oversupply, which lead
> to a crash.
>
> The meteorite craze started in 1997, when European
> prospectors in the Sahara
> found meteorites that, due to the dry climate, were
> practically virgin. At
> first, the stones traded among just a few hands, but soon
> mania spread. Before
> long, it began to display the usual signs of a bubble,
> including people sitting
> on collections instead of selling them. That lead to what
> was once
> inconceivable: a meteorite glut.
>
> "By 2001 everybody and their grandmother was in the
> Sahara," says meteorite
> dealer and appraiser Michael Casper. Nomadic tribesmen
> started dealing the
> rocks, and over a million grams of once scarce material
> flooded the market. That
> same year the craze imploded, and it hasn't returned.
> In Pictures: Tiny Bubbles From Baseball Cards To Beanie
> Babies
>
> A similar bubble occurred at roughly the same time in the
> fossil market. Through
> the late '90s, animal fossils appreciated in price,
> fueled by novelty and the
> plentiful money coming out of the tech bubble. The signal
> event of this craze
> was Sotheby's (nyse: BID - news - people ) 1997 sale of
> renowned T. rex skeleton
> "Sue" for $8.4 million.
>
> "It was a surprising peak," says Peter Larson,
> paleontologist and president of
> the Black Hills Institute. "It brought eight times
> more than I thought."
>
> Fossil-mania ran wild. Hollywood players like Nicholas
> Cage, Ron Howard and
> Leonardo DiCaprio maintained collections. Another T. rex,
> named Barnum, was
> bought by a team of investors who paid over $1 million
> dollars, hoping to flip
> the fossil. It eventually sold in 2006, for just $190,000.
>
> The bubble began to deflate when would-be flippers realized
> that fossil-hunting
> wasn't easy labor. "So much work and expertise
> needs to go into this," says
> Larson. "It's not the same thing as picking up a
> meteorite, or a coin. Most of
> the price (for a fossil) is in the labor."
>
> Unlike in the meteorite crash, the higher end of the fossil
> world has held
> value, even if it's not commanding the prices of the
> bubble's peak. "People
> still want to put their money into something real that will
> maintain its value,"
> says Larson. "Rice, corn and trilobites will always
> have some value."
>
> One of the hallmarks of a bubble is that dealers find many
> different ways to
> market and resell a single product. Take the comic book
> boom that started in the
> mid-1980s. Comic book publishers would come to produce
> variant covers of the
> same issue, inciting collectors to buy the same product
> multiple times.
> Collectors then hoarded the books, ensuring a glut. Much
> like repackaged
> mortgages, buyers found that a different cover on the same
> product was no
> indication of safety, quality or long-term desirability.
>
> Throughout the late '80s, and into the early '90s,
> the bubble grew higher, says
> Joseph Koch, a partner in New York City-based comic book
> store Forbidden Planet.
> There were far too many books for too few customers, he
> says. Dealers would buy
> cases of comic books for $2000, and only sell a few of the
> comics, holding onto
> the rest in hopes they'd go up in value. Like
> over-leveraged banks, dealers even
> went into hock with their distributors to buy more cases.
>
> Eventually it all backfired. Things came to a head during
> what is known in the
> comics biz as "Black April," in 1993. A number of
> different comics companies
> released heavily hyped books all at the same time,
> including Tribe, The Return
> of Superman and Turok. Customers initially lined up to buy,
> and values rose, but
> something went wrong. The problem, Koch says, was that
> collectors realized they
> didn't own anything valuable, because there was no
> scarcity. "It turned out that
> people had been buying comics by the case, and feeding them
> out slowly, but
> there were more copies than people realized," he says.
>
> The backlash was widespread. Stores went out business as
> collectors failed to
> buy dealers out of debt. The new wave of books ended up not
> being worth all that
> much, either. At the time, Ghost Rider was a hot title, and
> issue Nos. 4 and 5
> traded for $10 each. Today they go for $2.50.
>
> The pain spread to the comic publishers. Marvel Comics had
> two waves of firings,
> and smaller companies like Valiant Comics folded outright.
>
> Naturally, there were titles that emerged from the hype
> that have appreciated in
> value. Few traders paid attention to the early issues of
> Earthworm Jim, but
> today they trade at $10 apiece. You see, no one collected
> it.
>
> And the top end of the comics market has not only survived,
> but thrived. A
> pristine copy of August 1962's Amazing Fantasy No. 15,
> best known as the
> introduction of Spider-Man, sells today for $360,000. Okay,
> Earthworm Jim, let's
> see what you've got.
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Received on Thu 23 Oct 2008 09:49:59 AM PDT