> I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP.

There's a bigger culprit: NFTs. They sucked away a huge portion of art spending, with a promise of a fungible growth asset that you can just sell as needed. Art has always been considered a safe long-term investment (along with a means of conspicuous consumption), but it has always been non-liquid.

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Terr_ 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think that art-to-NFT flow is not really about storing value long-term, but about money laundering.

To be more specific, the main purpose of the "object" is to provide plausible-deniability for one half of an exchange where the other half can't be shown because it's illicit.

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brazzy 3 days ago | parent [-]

A popular hot take, but if that were the case, the art market should have collapsed when NFTs were booming, and recovered after they disappeared. Unless you can give a credible alternative that has eclipsed both.

	▲	Terr_ 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> the art market How would one measure "the art market" in a way that can be graphed? > should have collapsed Through what mechanism would it "collapse? Laundering tricks don't involve bidding wars or high volumes of items. Consider this scenario: 1. Alice wants to transfer $5m to Bob in exchange for something off the books. 2. Bob goes and buys anything he can find that seems to have a consistent ~50m price point. Since Bob's task doesn't require any specific item, he doesn't get into bidding wars to drive up prices. 3. Bob privately sells it to Alice, who deliberately pays a higher amount of $55m. No auction, no bidding wars. 4. Alice can either resell the item to unrelated people for probably ~$50m, or keep it around for a bit to provide either plausible-deniability or a future tool for an inbound cloaked transaction with someone else. How would that kind of activity charge up "the art market" in a way that is easy to measure? > when NFTs were booming Most of that boom was other speculation. My point is that an NFT by cyber-Rembrandt is a lot more convenient than certificate a real Rembrandt held in a freeport as its ownership shifts. The trick is getting something where the generally-accepted value is high enough that transactions can plausibly be hidden as noise in the signal.

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rsynnott 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This seems dubious, because the NFT market peaked and collapsed _before_ the art market did.

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pjc50 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, that's very dead now.