A Market Corner

Sorry to bring up the commerce thing again but last night I went to dinner with a friend of mine who is an Aston man...so to speak. He also works for one of the large auction companies and when I asked him how Astons were doing in this current world he told me about a man who has bought 350 left hand drive (only) 1950's and 60's Astons over the last few years and how that has driven the market in these cars. A week or so ago I was at a party in New England at a shop that also buys and sells cars and one of the owners was telling me how they had a client who over the last year had spent 25 million dollars on vintage cars, many of them Ferrari's, (including four red 275GTB's!). Just now I finished an article in last weeks NY Times magazine about the Mugrabi family that over the past period of years has bought over 3000 pieces of art, mostly from the same handful of artists which in effect set the market price for that particular artists work.

I remember all those folks in the past year or two telling us how this run up in car prices was different then in the 1980's because these were "end users" and not speculators etc. So next time, probably in another 25 years or so, those of us still alive should remember. Maybe the true value of a Daytona for instance is 80 - 150,000 and those other, higher, prices are the speculative bubble -exceptions- instead of the other way around.