How about $500,000 sneakers?
It’s the economy, stupid. Or is it just the stupid economy. The original line — paraphrased from Bill Clinton strategist James Carville — is an astute political observation.
It’s the answer to an implied question, something like: what is it that voters really care about? Answer: It’s the economy, stupid. But what happens if it is the economy that’s stupid?
Last week, someone paid US$352,800 (NZ$525,000) for a pair of limited edition Louis Vuitton x Nike Air Force 1 sneakers.
The pair (of size 5s) fetched the top price in a sale of 200 pairs which sold for a total of nearly NZ$40m.
Nike Air Force 1s are cool shoes. They are the go-to sneakers for hiphop stars.
The Louis Vuitton edition comes in a sort of two-tone beige and brown that my 1970s childhood makes me hugely partial to.
But just think about how crazy that price is.
The sneakers were listed at a Sotheby’s auction house with a reserve of about NZ$3000 and were expected to fetch between NZ$7500 and NZ$22,000.
Let’s convert them to a more relatable Kiwi asset — an Auckland villa.
That’s like a house, listed for auction with a $3 million reserve, being expected to fetch at least to three times that . . . and then selling for half a billion dollars!
I get that you can buy and sell collectable sneakers . . . or anything really.
That’s not new. There have been markets for stamps and comics for years.
But apparently, the sneaker market is running red-hot as an investment asset class.
I think that’s a symptom of a world awash with cash and afflicted and with an investment mentality that is divorced from the productive economy.
The depressing bit — for pessimistic economic commentators anyway — is that whoever bought these sneakers will probably still make a killing.
Unless global markets completely meltdown in the next few days or weeks they’ll have ample opportunity to flick them on for a quick profit.
The buyer probably isn’t stupid — but this economy is.
We don’t know who bought the sneakers but there’s a good chance they are untroubled by the effects of consumer price inflation.
They are almost certainly not coming home from the supermarket dismayed by the 5.9 per cent rise in the price of cheese and wondering if they should have bought those sneakers.
Just in case the Financial Markets Authority reads this I’d like to now disclose that I am not a registered financial adviser and the following does not constitute financial advice.
It’s a satirical device to highlight the excesses of the post-pandemic market bubble.
But anyway, my point is we definitely all need to put our savings into the sneaker market now — because if we don’t we might go
backwards in real terms.
We’re the suckers. Watching our KiwiSavers fall as investors pull money out of markets with real companies that make and do real things.
Or, leaving it in the bank and earning 3 per cent less than the rise in living costs.
How to invest to beat inflation has become one of the big barbecue questions lately.
People used to ask: what’s going to happen to interest rates?
But I think we’ve all got our head around that for now.
They are going up — if they don’t then hold on to your hat because something much worse must have happened.
What should we do with our money to beat inflation then? Sneakers, bitcoin, NFTs? Well, chasing higher returns by taking ever higher risks usually doesn’t end well.
That’s what keeps bubbles inflating until they pop. It’s what happened in 1987 and in 2008.
So my actual take is somewhat less exciting.
While the human stupidity rains down around us, we need to remember the golden rules of investing. We should think about and understand our own risk appetite.
For me, it might just be a case of riding out the storm and sticking with solid investments to offset the value loss until everything settles.
I still think it will all settle down and so do most economists.
Any chance we had for pandemic inflation to be a short transitory phenomenon has been lost.
Low vaccination rates and the failure to share vaccines with poor nations have given us new variants. These have extended the pandemic and with it production delays and shipping gridlock.
Never mind lockdowns, Americans have been too sick to go to work.
Meanwhile, on the Ukrainian border, the threat of war is pushing up energy prices.
And now, at the US/Canadian border, the anti-vax truck convoy is blocking the flow of goods and shutting down manufacturing on the US eastern seaboard.
That is the sort of disruption thing that ripples around the world, messing up supply chains everywhere and adding to inflation.
But I’m optimistic we can avoid a spiral into 1970s- and 80s-style stagflation — (effectively recession and inflation combined).
To do so we need to get the world out from the inflationary crush of the pandemic and back to some sort of normality.
We need to get there before central banks get to the real crunch in the inflation fight.
If they are forced to choose between lifting interest rates to levels that crush economic growth, or letting inflation soar, there will be no winners.
Even the luxury sneaker investors may then find they have nowhere to run.
While the human stupidity rains down around us, we need to remember the golden rules of investing.