Been marinating in my brain...
Bags of gasoline, toilet paper, water bottles, land, houses, gold, bitcoin, dogecoin, baseball cards, pokemon toys, amiibos, sneakers, you name it.
The media will frame this as the irresponsible and ignorant hoarding of your fellow man, the unending greed of American citizens; but I also have to think of this speaks to, oft unexamined in mainstream news outlets, the desperation of regular folks. They buy bags of gasoline not just for themselves but on the off chance they make it big. They hoard toilet paper on the off chance they can sell in excess. Everything is a hustle because when you are starving, are broke, got bills up to your neck, you have to hustle.
Or am I wrong? Is it a fundamentally American thing to reach certain stratas of society and just want to greedily turn every object into a cash-cow, a golden goose egg? Once you reach an extra 30k of income, and you don't want to waste it on your dumb stupid family, you decide to gamble with it out of sheer boredom?
Who are these people really?
I have a friend that purchased a ton of Pokemon cards during the pandemic and I've been trying to get him to sell most of them to pay off his car or use on something else.
I'd be okay with them investing the money from selling the cards into stocks at this point (though I'm worried they'd use it to buy crypto), but they won't get out of the mindset that the price will keep going up forever on these damn Pokemon cards. I made the Beanie Baby comparison already, it didn't work.
I blame capitalism for this, but subreddits specifically. The constant optimism and ingroup stuff they are bombarded with on there is staggering. He is neurodivergent like me, so it is difficult to convince him of anything.
That's another area I have been thinking about and concerned with. Mass media and communications allow every snake oil salesman to offer you a solution to your ails including financial, but add to that an almost religious zeal of "Reaching the promise land" by just holding out a little more. That you were the "true believers". Forgetting that all of these people have ulterior motives. "HOLD" they yell and meme; while they themselves are selling and dumping their stocks, their cards, their crypto.
I agree, the big posters and/or mods are definitely going to take care of themselves before telling anyone in a public website or even a Telegram channel to sell. It wouldn't surprise me if institutional investors were somehow involved too.
The funny thing is, he's aware of this. When I told them one of the new cryptos they bought $200 of was probably a scam, they were already aware of it and they (and every other member of some Discord) are waiting for other people to buy it to raise the price before they sell.
The same thing is creeping into retro games. I used to sell retro games for a living and know more or less what the supply and demand ratio is for most. The stuff going for hundreds of thousands has to be artificial inflation, no seller it their right mind would have asked for anywhere near that much, even a bidding war wouldn't get even near what some of this shit is 'going' for. That being said I wish I'd kept some of my old stock in storage until now, I could have cleaned up.