World Share Markets Crashing.

I look at the losses on the global markets around the world and wonder how it is going to affect the sale of stamps.

This strong down turn in the global markets is just the beginning of a huge crash in, shares, precious metals, employment, inflation, interest rates etc I believe.

There is great worry about the China market but I believe the big worry is Europe and America.They are both ready to unravel big time.

America is still on 0% rates with nowhere else to go. And what about Europe....

We could be starting to look at the end of a long term era that has not changed in our life time.

Hoping very much that the Australia stamp market place does not get too smashed about. But it does look like we are all in for some grief. How much is the question?

I've got my G.I. Joe collection to fall back on.

World markets sputtering could be a leading indicator for a big run on investment quality stamps.

I see the oil dollar has been going down every day for months . Obama messed with Russia And they told him not to because it would backfire. And now look whats going on. I think the world just dropped American petrol dollar and cut there losses Now they can use any kind of money they want because Obama broke the Opec agreement and now china buys from Russia That was really smart eh.Hide your stamps we will survive lol.

Laissez-faire capitalism has not been spotted anywhere in the Cosmos for more than a century. Now crony-capitalism/fascism has been. While you flog a dead horse (laissez-faire capitalism) the world returns to mercantilism.


It's true that in mercantilism the wealthy run everything. The difference between that and the free market capitalism that once obtained is that under the latter, people in the middle have opportunities. In the mercantilism we are headed into, they are reduced to serfdom.

Serfs don't collect stamps, as a general rule. But neither do mercantilist monopolists (those who are granted monopolies by the Kings--today we call them cronies)--they collect obsequious serfs instead.


Kings have collected stamps, so perhaps you can take solace in the fact that the top dogs in the new bureaucratic royalty might want your collection.

Interestingly, a crash in China could actually help the US and EU economies, at least the more advanced ones. With the price of commodities such as oil likely to keep falling, consumers in the West will have more disposable income.

This in turn would likely help China and other emerging markets to recover from the impact of the speculative market crash faster than what happened in the West in wake of the Great Depression, provided of course that global trade does not get struck with tariffs and choked to death, as happened in the 1930s when all the major economies retreated to autarky.

The USA and the West in general still remain the engine of global economic growth. It is when consumer demand in the West drops that the global economy really begins to struggle. So long as the USA and other Western nations undertake policies to encourage consumption, I think the China bubble bursting will be a short-term hiccup rather than the start of something more severe.

But I'm trained as a historian, not an economist, so I could be very well wrong.

As far as stamp values go, the China stamp market has been correcting for a while, and with its stock market crashing there could be an uptick as people seek "safer" investments. But longer term who knows. The Western stamp markets might see upticks as well, especially the US stamp market. Though countries dependent on exports of raw materials, like Canada and Australia, could see some drops. Emerging market stamps really will be on a country-by-country basis. Turkey, for example, derives much of its growth through exports of consumer goods to Western Europe and emerging markets, so its stamp market which has been quite strong the past few years could hold up. India has been quite hot of late, and if the current BJP govt can open up the Indian market further and cut all the bureaucracy India could actually benefit greatly from China's short-term malaise.

And lest we forget, the greatest expansion in interest in stamp collecting came during the Great Depression, when people had meager disposable income to spend on entertainment. Having a president that collected stamps (as well as a King of England) didn't hurt either true but that is one of the great things about philately - you do not need to be a millionaire to build up a respectable collection.

In the end though, anyone who see stamps as an investment first before being a hobby is probably setting themselves up for heartache unless they have decades left until they will need to sell their holdings.

The large drop in some currencies (the Euro, the Loonie, the Aussie & the Kiwi as examples) against the US dollar make it very difficult for buyers in those countries to buy anything sold in US dollars, so stamp sales (retail and auction) by sellers in the US to buyers in these other countries have fallen.

I believe this is a correction.

Re: drop in currencies vs. US $. In the last two weeks I have purchased items from Canada and Australia which were priced in their local currencies. A few months ago, both of them would have been more expensive in US $. However, living in northern NY on the Canadian border, Canadian tourists/buyers are very important here. The local shopping mall which in the past few years was filled with Québec license plates are now mostly NY and Vermont plates.

Yes I am with you.

But when is a correction not a correction.

More falls overnight here.