Blogenfruede

I've felt a fair amount of Blogenfruede over the last few days. The collapse of Indymac and the strains on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have felt... inevitable, somehow.

Yep, I knew this was going to happen.

Well, not this...but something LIKE this.

One of the first blog entries I made was to say: Bubbles pop bigger than you think, and the consequences last longer than you can possibly believe.

You see, I've often kicked myself for getting so deep into baseball cards; yet the real damage wasn't getting into them, it was in not getting out of them quickly enough. I mean....it was obvious they were ridiculously overpriced and overproduced. But....I couldn't believe that the system wouldn't somehow absorb the damage, somehow, someway. I mean, surely the card companies couldn't be that stupid.

I was completely naive and clueless.

The collapse of the comic market only reinforced that lesson. It was bad enough when comics quit selling -- but it was the reaction... the overreaction...of the powers that be that really created the havoc. Marvel panicked and bought a distributor; the other comic companies panicked and consolidated around another distributor. And before you knew it, two thirds the comics shops had disappeared, and every distributor but one.

The bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage. Sports cards were huge for me, and comics were too. Pokemon, beanie babies, pogs? I handled them well, but they also didn't have the potential to drag the whole system down with them. Only the unwary, and by then I was a very, very
wary wabbit.

This could still get much worse, especially in Bend.