Book value = $50.
Elie writes:
As a kid growing up in the 1990's I collected NHL hockey cards. I would spend my allowance on a couple packs each week, collect entire sets, and then dutifully set the cards in plastic sheets for them to accrue in value. I looked up the going price in the Beckett catalog and dreamed of my future fortunes when I would sell the cards off a couple decades later. Originally, I only collected Topps and O-pee-chee, but then came Upper Deck, Fleer and even McDonald's started offering cards. The market become flooded with different varieties, but the Beckett guide said they were all valuable so I dutifully kept collecting.
But then the hockey card market utterly crashed and all the mint condition rookie cards and boxes of unopened card packs are utterly worthless, and it seems to me like there are many parallels with the current economic bubble, especially as it relates to housing. We all bought houses or hockey cards under the false assumption that they were a valuable and limited commodity, signing away our live savings or our allowances, going into debt with banks or with our parents, and then it all came tumbling down. I should have seen it all coming in the mid-90s when I was 13. Now I'm saddled with all these toxic assets that I don't want to get rid off because I spent my entire childhood income on them and don't want to get a raw deal. Damn you Wayne Gretzky!
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