After the Beanie Baby bubble burst

<p>“It’s just so sad to see somebody spend so much money on something that isn’t real.” That’s what Karen Boeker, counterfeit Beanie Baby expert, says motivates her work: separating the valuable Beanie Babies from the pretenders. Of course, the value of the real ones is debatable, too. Honestly, if you think about it too long, the entire concept of worth can fall apart.</p> <p>Boeker, 54, can’t quite pinpoint why she’s dedicated more than 25 years of her life to Beanie Babies. The frenzy around them faded long ago, as these types of things tend to do. Maybe she has an addictive personality. Maybe it’s the thrill of the chase. Maybe it’s just that they’re cute. Whatever the case, she’s kept at it. She sold Beanie Babies to pay for an emergency appendectomy about 20 years ago and, more recently, to help pay for her son’s wedding. She’s also one of three women behind a Beanie Baby <a href="https://beaniebabiespriceguide.com/">pricing guide</a> and a Facebook group for collectors with tens of thousands of members. Combined, they have several decades of Beanie experience. Their names, naturally, are Karen, Karen, and Becky.</p> <p>Boeker and Becky — Estenssoro — also run a Beanie Baby authentication service, <a href="https://truebluebeans.com/">True Blue Beans</a>. Estenssoro used to do the authenticating alone, and Boeker joined in April 2021. They charge $5 per Beanie Baby for a sticker that says whether the toy is counterfeit; for $15, they’ll put it in a tamper-resistant display case and tell you whether it’s “museum quality,” “mint condition,” and even “magnificent.”</p> <p>“You get all those adjectives in there,” Boeker says. Their customers prefer that they don’t give negative marks to the Beanies, but they have to be honest. “If it’s a dirty Beanie,” they’ll say so.</p> <div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <aside><q>When I ask what makes a Beanie Baby worth anything, her answer is a frank one: “It’s what people are willing to pay for it”</q></aside> </div> <p>At the height of Beanie Baby mania in the 1990s, plenty of people genuinely believed the toys might be the key to their retirement or their kids’ college tuition. Some people <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/20/nyregion/suspect-found-but-not-the-beanie-babies.html">stole</a> litters of them, and at least one person was reportedly <a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2004-08-31-0408310304-story.html">killed</a> in a Beanie-related dispute. Now, when cleaning out their basements or going through bins left behind by their grandparents, some people decide to check in — just in case — to see if they’re sitting on a gold mine of ’90s relics. Most of the time, they aren’t. “I hate getting people’s hopes up, because we’re constantly crushing dreams,” Boeker says. “I don’t like that.”</p> <p>It’s not that Beanie Babies are worthless — collectors in the hobby are willing to pay quite a bit of money for the right ones. It’s that the most coveted Beanie Babies today are the ones most people have never heard of.</p> <p>When I ask Boeker what makes a Beanie Baby worth anything, then or today, her answer is frank: “It’s what people are willing to pay for it.” Why some people are willing to pay anything for it is harder to square.</p> <p>For most, it’s unfathomable to imagine spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a stuffed animal. Then again, it’s also unfathomable to imagine how we value most things, from personal mementos to art to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22664469/bored-ape-yacht-club-sothebys-auction-amount">blunt-smoking digital apes</a>. It’s easy to look at the current financial landscape and recognize hints of Beanie Baby-like bubbles in, for example, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22313936/non-fungible-tokens-crypto-explained">NFTs</a>. The interest in both of them has a bit of a je ne sais quoi element. But the same goes for all markets. Personal and objective worth are inevitably intertwined. There’s an unavoidable human nature to value.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p>The Beanie Baby craze swept the United States and much of the globe in the 1990s. The era was marked by the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1997/12/24/for-charity-and-hype-a-princess-beanie/1d315e11-4869-4728-8a42-9145869c9904/">hunt</a> for the Princess Diana bear, endless lines outside Hallmark stores in anticipation of new releases, people hoarding tiny stuffed toys with names like Quackers and Nip and Peanut in their living rooms and desperately protecting their tags. Boeker jokes she and her friends were “feeding all the homeless in Houston” after circling around McDonald’s drive-throughs buying Happy Meals to secure the Teenie Beanies found inside. (They did, in fact, donate the food.)</p> <p>The world experienced a sort of collective delusion around the worth of what is, essentially, a fabric sack of beans. In hindsight, bubbles rarely make sense. “It’s a flaw in the human character,” says Jeremy Grantham, market historian and bubble expert. “No one is immune, no matter how smart you are.”</p> <p>Beanie Babies were the creation of Ty Warner, the elusive billionaire behind toy company Ty Inc., which he founded in 1986. He launched Beanie Babies in 1993, and initially, people didn’t get it. “At the beginning, nobody really wanted Beanie Babies,” says Lina Trivedi, one of Ty’s earliest employees. Consumers didn’t seem to quite get them, and retailers didn’t think they’d fit the aesthetic of their stores. Then, she says, it felt like a switch flipped overnight. Beanie Babies took off in the suburbs of Chicago, where Ty’s headquarters was located, and then fanned out. “When you’re in the midst of it, you don’t really see the intensity escalating or whatever,” Trivedi says, “because you’re in the vortex of it all.”</p> <p>To the extent he could, Warner manufactured the craze around the items — the endeavor was, after all, to make money.</p> <div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image"><span class="e-image__inner"><span class="e-image__image" data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1642004365_6554_341311" data-cdata='{"asset_id":23150484,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/idMvDHpEJGaXK4YFztAvnkzOPBY=/0x0:694x1117/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/iUYqZtESRsZdI4iysPOQ91ipwWM=/0x0:694x1117/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/iG5vyFkVDXh2erzjs7e3-cvU2jA=/0x0:694x1117/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7-FhAKMTwKU9xauWW5xiZxR980g=/0x0:694x1117/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UCcxmFBzNrdx7TT7i5hbomKPD4g=/0x0:694x1117/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6TfMglwaQhfs-kjDsL9j8TzG7o8=/0x0:694x1117/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KuR1-vfn3Nc-LEfF0kbuDYS55tc=/0x0:694x1117/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Bei12fRnyFhtKQkx7PMHqpjPkQQ=/0x0:694x1117/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gbEnLHC-BgTGa_w_qoM2kbxMTzs=/0x0:694x1117/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="694" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jgDyZtmsP1Ni8E_dsDO5RLUY98Y=/0x0:694x1117/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_8YQvRohdVX_5MP0zAfHBTxFJiQ=/0x0:694x1117/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fwCVRy7Nx33yzoXfHJExl4hNpoI=/0x0:694x1117/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8vlyqEn0Uet7uyT3p2iwzi1o8mQ=/0x0:694x1117/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/g0jGkEIfzaRd7hXo5npVCy_yjVQ=/0x0:694x1117/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_MpaNrLQiTH00reBJ4SkA0VbgDA=/0x0:694x1117/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eOcuYeJZs0tbKZKZp1HHi6LTzb0=/0x0:694x1117/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ySQPgXRkSUn2ZmWWsZBCFAJwro8=/0x0:694x1117/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/U54WncaxZiOcnEMTXbQm6D-1tXE=/0x0:694x1117/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6tBmYNGk3oRJzdd_H2SDHtoOyX8=/0x0:694x1117/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:694x1117):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150484/bunnybeanie.png 1920w" /></picture></span></span></figure> </div> <p>Despite retailers’ and shoppers’ initial reservations, the Beanie Babies were indeed cute, and Warner’s team attached names, poems, and birthdays to them to make them more personal. Most of the original ones were written by Trivedi. The toys were accessibly priced, and at the same time, Warner was able to pull supply strings to create a sense of scarcity around them. Warner would retire certain Beanies, upping the ante even more not only on the primary market but also on the secondary market, where prices of the $5 items soared into the <a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-04-11-1997101002-story.html">hundreds</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/07/business/spending-it-the-hunt-is-on-for-the-toy-that-will-make-parents-panic.html">thousands</a> of dollars.</p> <p>There’s also an element of inexplicability to any fad. “What sort of lights the fire, we just don’t really know,” says Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology.</p> <p>Maureen Laughead, a relatively early collector from Pennsylvania, recalled her daughters selling three politically themed Beanies — Righty, Lefty, and Libearty — to a local ice cream store in exchange for $1,000 and a Princess bear, which was released after Princess Diana’s death in 1997. The Princess bear was the “it” Beanie of the era. “If I tried to sell those three now, I’m sure they’re not worth anything,” she says.</p> <p>At its most basic level, value is how much someone is willing to pay for something, given all the other stuff they could pay for instead. It’s how much worth they ascribe to the thing based on what they feel they get out of it. But there are different ways of thinking about the concept. In Marxist terms, there’s use value — the extent to which something fulfills a want or a need — and there’s exchange value, the proportion to which it can be exchanged for something else.</p> <p>At the height of the Beanie Baby craze, the use and exchange value that people were ascribing to the stuffed animals became completely untethered. The market was completely distorted.</p> <p>“It becomes a bubble when it disconnects from the value,” Grantham says. “Prices spiral up.”</p> <p>An entire media ecosystem of Beanie Babies emerged, from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1997/05/11/shes-the-mother-lode-of-beanie-lore/220fad64-25ee-4225-be01-f9635bfabff0/">early-stage blogs</a> to magazines to trade shows. Estenssoro was one of the first avid collectors with her neighbor, Becky Phillips, in the Chicago suburbs. “At first, we didn’t know it was going to be this big old thing,” Estenssoro says. Once the toys began to catch on, the pair began documenting them and building early collections, eventually launching the first Beanie Baby price guide.</p> <p>Beanie Babies were among the first big internet fervors, and their rise coincided with <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/10/16/16473414/ebay-online-shopping-resale">eBay’s</a>. In May 1997, eBay auctioned off $500 million worth of Beanie Babies, accounting for 6 percent of its total annual sales. When the platform went public in 1998, Beanie Babies accounted for 10 percent of total company sales. That same year, the New York Times Magazine chronicled the proliferation of Beanie-related crimes, declaring, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/05/magazine/sunday-july-5-1998-crime-a-world-gone-beanie-mad.html">A world gone Beanie mad!</a>”</p> <p>Perhaps the most emblematic photo of the Beanie Baby bubble was one snapped of an estranged couple named Frances and Harold Mountain — a judge ordered them to separate out the animals on a courtroom floor during divorce proceedings. “It’s ridiculous and embarrassing,” Frances Mountain complained at the time, before, as the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-nov-06-mn-30725-story.html">Los Angeles Times reported</a>, “squatting on the courtroom floor alongside her ex-husband to choose first from a pile of stuffed toys.” The image came to epitomize the moment — grown adults were swept up in a baffling belief that these stuffed animals were highly valued possessions.</p> <div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image"><span class="e-image__inner"><span class="e-image__image" data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1642004365_2519_341312" data-cdata='{"asset_id":23150426,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YhHVBnRB8wWOtqZmF-nVbR66O30=/0x0:2048x1548/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hoUlra9YiPUk07hVEvogEuAwiGs=/0x0:2048x1548/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2JukjECEXiws5DaXbuIeQ46qMl0=/0x0:2048x1548/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UY25ULlbpJyljMriwtid9cEpm70=/0x0:2048x1548/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NNJEjhazhc5fF6_qQLsfFjCWYCM=/0x0:2048x1548/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9XdWG1SzLEafQtI3PU-tcLSDdsw=/0x0:2048x1548/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Dwp58zDBF_GtWri-JzqmhvZEu9o=/0x0:2048x1548/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GbmjjI1vjxuXXzahlopoPgSZ5pA=/0x0:2048x1548/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8vcefrD6Pl_7EEnls_Bf4BM6TUA=/0x0:2048x1548/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1920w" sizes="90vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="A couple divides up Beanie babies, kneeling on a courtroom floor." data-upload-width="2048" sizes="90vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/AheE3J7rZLcDrvewK33FznQojBs=/0x0:2048x1548/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yjEFZWjg_QFL7QE0oHR2k4RuTlk=/0x0:2048x1548/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/biDL2LRoia02CswpM4Ioa68GSnc=/0x0:2048x1548/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZmsUAv7SER21a9ldjWOqL_xAu1o=/0x0:2048x1548/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WRozH2gWYXs4OCFdrSfmYR0DJbE=/0x0:2048x1548/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/znLqsWhovUlACEfc6Fydqcn2yUE=/0x0:2048x1548/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TE8ie9UfbImXdA10-YyS2w2HlnA=/0x0:2048x1548/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dkU7xgdng2oVsdrmELzzxBYJzes=/0x0:2048x1548/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UK6DZStQIJ7dcHC4ReVEY6fIghs=/0x0:2048x1548/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BaMZQb0b8A7XlsVCst5BKrnqqmk=/0x0:2048x1548/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:2048x1548):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150426/2D5G15R.jpg 1920w" /></picture></span></span> <figcaption><span class="e-image__meta">Frances and Harold Mountain divide their Beanie assets.</span></figcaption> <span class="e-image__meta"><cite>Reuters/Alamy Stock</cite></span></figure> </div> <p>But the lore around the photo isn’t accurate: The moment wasn’t about the money, it was about revenge. Frances had been awarded primary physical custody of their children as part of what was an “ugly, disputed divorce,” recalls Frank Toti, an attorney who worked for Frances on the case. Harold asked to take half of the Beanie Babies “out of spite,” Toti says. “It had nothing to do with Beanie Babies, it had everything to do with the father being upset about not being awarded custody.” After selecting a few of the Beanie Babies from the pile, Harold gave up and said his ex-wife could have the rest.</p> <p>The Beanie Baby bubble burst at the turn of the century; the “<a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/animal-spirits.asp">animal spirits</a>” — a term coined by British economist John Maynard Keynes — driving the market fell away. The toys were mass-produced, so beyond those from the earliest generations, few were actually rare. Price declines begat more price declines, and the Beanie Baby smoke, in a way, lifted. And so millions of Americans were left with millions of Beanie Babies in their basements; forgetting the passé toys except for, now and then, the errant consideration of what to do with them.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p>Looking back at a mad rush around often-colorful, often-cutesy, questionably useful odds and ends, it’s hard not to see what’s currently going on in the NFT market and wonder whether it’s Beanie Baby-esque. There’s a similar level of unbridled optimism and a rush to claim ownership over relatively arbitrary items in the belief that their value will go up. The nascent arena is also plagued by <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-nfts-then-they-got-scammed">scams</a> and <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/24/nft_users/">potential crimes</a>.</p> <p>Many NFT aficionados refute the suggestion that they’re dealing in digital Beanie Babies. They say Beanie Babies didn’t have the same sense of community (they did), that they weren’t as high-profile (they were), and that NFTs have a much more tangible utility than Beanie Babies (up for debate). However, Arthur Suszko, a collector of both Beanie Babies and NFTs, embraces the comparison. “There’s a lot of parallels between what’s going on with NFTs now versus Beanie mania in the ’90s,” he says.</p> <div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <aside><q>“There’s a lot of parallels between what’s going on with NFTs now versus Beanie mania in the ’90s”</q></aside> </div> <p>Suszko, 34, was into Beanie Babies as a kid and began collecting them again as an adult. His current project is to create NFTs of his Beanie Babies, where people could buy the NFT and therefore ownership rights, but his company would still hold onto the physical item unless the buyer later traded the token back in. It would essentially separate ownership from possession. “It’s a merger of my childhood dreams and modern passions coming together,” he says. Still, he’s aware the NFT moment is likely fleeting. “Nobody’s going to care about random jpegs that might be selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars right now.”</p> <p>The market for Beanie Babies didn’t vanish entirely after the crash, but today’s market does look different — and indeed, the vast majority of them aren’t worth much. There are still expensive Beanie Babies out there, they’re just nowhere as well-known as, for example, the Princess bear. “It’s funny, because sometimes the ones that are actually worth a lot of money, they don’t realize are worth a lot of money because they’re not talked about, because they’re rarer Beanies,” says Karen Holmes, the other Karen of Karen, Karen, and Becky. She maintains the price guide website, where a series of ebooks laying out the costs of Beanie Babies and other Ty products are available starting at $5.95.</p> <p>According to the scarcity principle, things become more desirable when they are in limited supply. In the ’90s, Ty used the illusion of scarcity to drive the urgency around Beanie Babies. People were made to believe they were in short supply when in actuality they weren’t, and once they realized that was the case, some of the allure faded. In the aftermath, the scarcity principle still applies, perhaps in a more real fashion. If everyone’s selling the same Beanie, it’s not a hard-to-find Beanie, and therefore it’s probably not expensive. Indeed, the priciest ones are those most people have no idea even exist. Some were never sold in stores at all.</p> <p>Enter Chef Robuchon, which was created in 2006, years after the ’90s bubble burst. The light brown bear wears a white chef’s hat and embroidered jacket with a French flag-themed collar, and the Beanie Babies price guide values it at up to $6,500 if in mint condition — up to $8,000 with the case and invitation. Ty Warner handed out the bears to celebrate the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/dining/09robuchon.html">opening of a restaurant</a> helmed by chef Joël Robuchon at the Four Seasons hotel in New York, which Warner owned. The toys were given to food critics and journalists, most of whom probably never gave them a second thought, and many have been lost. “When it was given out, nobody really knew about it because it was given to foodies,” Holmes says, “not to Beanie people.”</p> <p>Beanie people would have known better than to brush off a Chef Robuchon bear.</p> <p>As a general rule in the Beanie trade, the older and rarer, the better. What’s on the tags, and how the tags look, matters. It’s not entirely intuitive. What seems like the tiniest thing can mean a hundred- or even thousand-dollar difference to those in the know. A regular Libearty — a white bear with an American flag on it — in top condition isn’t generally worth much more than its original $5 price. But if it’s got a Summer Olympics tag on it, Boeker says, its worth can jump up to over $1,000. Ty apparently didn’t have permission to use the official Olympic trademark in 1996, and so for most of the Beanies, the mark was removed. A light blue Peanut the elephant can go for up to $100; one made in a darker royal blue could fetch up to $1,500.</p> <div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image"><span class="e-image__inner"><span class="e-image__image" data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1642004365_9524_341313" data-cdata='{"asset_id":23150576,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/strnLauj7CL3z0iXBca04en9Qco=/0x0:1158x1180/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/j5DySJ08o-KIE0gzx4wCZ8ih_zc=/0x0:1158x1180/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZFr-LePtEHOcSfqbnNX8Q6fIObk=/0x0:1158x1180/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FZz0YkT72sbqkjM4Ji8zVK7j5Jg=/0x0:1158x1180/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/n-hOPc6bveN7b0L4c_2ApWZ72VU=/0x0:1158x1180/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/G2xcd249tUcMqkYhZLKXGvO-asw=/0x0:1158x1180/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IUMpjoZWMFlTD0iv0K8L5mFKq-c=/0x0:1158x1180/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wUEwSd_AKd7HP6QoRdGgfZD6fGo=/0x0:1158x1180/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/L28q9QwcHQjPbV95XeWtlMuQF9c=/0x0:1158x1180/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="1158" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/S79T4oK9ePODdz178md-h6N8qZE=/0x0:1158x1180/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BY5-dctE_PrPfEpkN6XBMgwLBh8=/0x0:1158x1180/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hAlHFhG7QJd3aiCvNtOg0j9oRJw=/0x0:1158x1180/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BvEejg7xtQ3_Uc3mE3r2jh64S54=/0x0:1158x1180/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DlJXejE1V2QqHhpsnKHURBzxt1Q=/0x0:1158x1180/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/g9u2EsxrK5fLoJc0Rxh362TzkFI=/0x0:1158x1180/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/-L_ut1L5vXNpE2x91Q_Y_5uQHT0=/0x0:1158x1180/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fCtdQMlPfJeU7Ce9Vj9PvaPoeCs=/0x0:1158x1180/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KD7tP6GamEVnfXTj1CB5R4uEwU0=/0x0:1158x1180/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/V5Iswm2pWuF9gzbdINPJeS5z_hE=/0x0:1158x1180/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1158x1180):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150576/elephant.png 1920w" /></picture></span></span></figure> </div> <p>“It’s all in the details,” Boeker says. In a sea of tiny red heart-shaped tags hanging off the toys, a star or the curvature of a letter matters.</p> <p>It can feel like the people deep in the hobby almost speak in code, referring off-hand to generations of hang tags and tush tags and naming off the toys like familiar characters, in the way you or I might mention, say, Mickey Mouse or Batman.</p> <p>Caleb Riley, 26, learned to crack the code thanks, in part, to Boeker. His mother collected Beanie Babies years ago and finally handed them over to him to try to sell. In those efforts, he’s learned more about the stuffed animals than he’s ever cared to know. In 2021, he posted a MasterCard Beanie Baby to the Facebook group the Beanie Baby ladies run. The bear had a brown nose instead of a black nose, and that difference garnered him what he says were a dozen offers in a single day. Boeker warned him not to sell it for under $1,500. “It was like mania,” he says. He sold it and a handful of other Beanie Babies for $5,000.</p> <p>Of course, Riley’s experience is the exception. Plenty of people who are sitting on mounds of the plushes aren’t Beanie Baby thousandaires. Holmes estimates that of the roughly 3,000 variations of Beanies out there, one-third are worth more than they originally retailed for, though often not by much.</p> <p>There are generally three stages of collecting in consumer culture: acquisition, possession, and disposition. In the current zeitgeist, Beanie Babies are stuck in limbo between phase two and phase three. Most people aren’t super jazzed about the Beanies they’ve got on hand. They’re not really in a hurry to get rid of them, either.</p> <p>There are, however, still people in the acquisition phase of collecting, such as James Hamblin, a 42-year-old father of two who lives in Massachusetts. When I first spoke to Hamblin about his Beanie Baby collection, he blamed it on his daughter. “Of course, the kids want the harder Beanies to find,” he says. When I asked him whether she was allowed to play with the Beanies, he cracked. “I mean, I do buy some for her, but then the ones that I buy are pretty high in price,” he says, chuckling at the acknowledgment that it’s much more of a dad hobby than a daughter one. “She gets some of the crumbs.”</p> <p>Demographically, Hamblin isn’t unique in his interest in Beanie Babies. Just as the most coveted Beanies today are not the ones you might think, neither are the identities of the people collecting them. I came across a lot of men in their 30s and 40s, especially in the high-dollar market. It’s sort of equivalent to the My Little Pony enthusiast <a href="https://www.wired.com/2011/06/bronies-my-little-ponys/">Bronies</a> — call them Beanie Bronies.</p> <p>Hamblin says he really has no idea why he got into Beanie Babies, joking that maybe it’s a midlife crisis. He finds the chase addicting and gets a rush out of finding a Beanie Baby he’s been on the hunt for; his goal is to collect all of the first- through third-generation Beanies (essentially, the early ones). Thus far, he’s amassed about 200 toys in total and thinks he’s spent about $50,000 on the endeavor, the priciest being a third-generation royal blue Peanut with a German tag at $2,500. While other people have a “deep love” of Beanie Babies, Hamblin insists it’s not the case for him. “I don’t really have any sort of attachment to them, I’ve just set myself a goal,” he says. “Hopefully, one day I’ll either sell them or I’ll display them properly.”</p> <div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <aside><q>“I don’t really have any sort of attachment to them, I’ve just set myself a goal”</q></aside> </div> <p>Hamblin has met similarly enthused Beanie Bronies, like his friend Joe Mancuso, 35, who says he was offered free Beanies in exchange for intimate pictures of himself (he declined), and Nick Rosato, 32, who began selling Beanie Babies, in part, to help keep his family afloat when he was out of work. “We ended up making ends meet any way we could, which unfortunately involved selling off some of my collectibles,” Rosato says. “But you do what’s best for your family.”</p> <p>The men of Beanie world aren’t just suburban dads. Nearly everyone I spoke with for this story referenced one young man, a startup co-founder based in New York, who is an extremely well-connected collector and dealer in the field. He helped Boeker secure a Russian exclusive bear she’d been after, and Riley says he was the buyer of the MasterCard bear. He deals in exotics and prototypes. “If you want a Beanie Baby,” Hamblin says, “he’s the one I’d go to.” The collector declined to speak on the record for this story, though he was also very concerned that I get my facts straight. Even this market still has its whales.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p>The Beanie Baby world might not be what it once was, but it’s by no means quiet. There’s excitement: accusations of scammery, disagreements around what it means to certify an item’s value and who gets to decide.</p> <p>Take a quick spin around the internet and it’s quite easy to come across a list of Beanie Babies that are allegedly worth thousands of dollars. On eBay, you can almost always find a Princess bear for sale with an asking price higher than the typical house. The thing is that you can list anything on eBay for anything. The other thing is that there are a lot of Princess bears out there. While they were a hot commodity in 1997 when they first came out, in the year 2022, not so much.</p> <div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image"><span class="e-image__inner"><span class="e-image__image" data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1642004365_6707_341314" data-cdata='{"asset_id":23150662,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JcjVlLq5UL1slFlWObZ1Q94f6YE=/0x0:1327x1960/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/A5fLvSa1Ks8O17iB9J2_crrVJGk=/0x0:1327x1960/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zlMXrtVFoL4u_3iIv8RoSyDIWT8=/0x0:1327x1960/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/J-3LuC4UzezGwJE_eWoSjGxE6Gg=/0x0:1327x1960/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PpGr6e2ljX4kFelPKzr6sV2ERd4=/0x0:1327x1960/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Shn_tfHuWdee_ADTv06gSlCPsA8=/0x0:1327x1960/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LzfEML3ftYJfuK0_K2GxmkvCYHQ=/0x0:1327x1960/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zoY8J18PJADOuCl0qcvL4vFut_k=/0x0:1327x1960/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0rOqFfqPtUzEnZcNHwcK_zPXYy4=/0x0:1327x1960/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="1327" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CMIV69gX0B7hfRg7rYCZj7Tqau4=/0x0:1327x1960/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UOEjygL8JJBIMLAWh2NB_xbXX24=/0x0:1327x1960/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QbGF4xqObYyfNlKH0ozD1tiYZL0=/0x0:1327x1960/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0vENexTcUqR1TtHSE8TEEC-Y75M=/0x0:1327x1960/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/G1IsbJEIabN6NU9B300ZJiCjy8I=/0x0:1327x1960/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/N5lY6hH_OsiSKvLITOhqYiPozSE=/0x0:1327x1960/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8CaTa10cYM7WcuoOeXL_DNe4Pdo=/0x0:1327x1960/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DWFmc7SX-OUvpKmLbm81EHWG8zM=/0x0:1327x1960/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9LGLjWKDVsI9YNn8b14NvQaspQM=/0x0:1327x1960/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/09BgK8LUzmMb72KssKSWNPEeLvI=/0x0:1327x1960/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1327x1960):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150662/GettyImages_830026898.jpg 1920w" /></picture></span></span> <figcaption><span class="e-image__meta">The Princess Beanie, with Princess Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell, when it was released in 1997.</span></figcaption> <span class="e-image__meta"><cite>Suzanne Hubbard/PA Images via Getty Images</cite></span></figure> </div> <p>“A lot of people are still looking at clickbait articles that say Princess is worth half a million,” Holmes says. “It’s not.” Many Princess bears on eBay are being sold for under $20.</p> <p>Holmes, Boeker, and Estenssoro view their mission, in part, as one of educating people about what is and isn’t valuable in Beanie Babies. Boeker has expertise in looking out for counterfeits, which were quite common during the bubble. The trio frets about rumors that errors on tags mean they’re especially valuable, even though most of the time they mean nothing at all. (Plenty of errors were also mass-produced.) They speculate that some of the eBay listings are money-laundering schemes, or at least say they think they used to be.</p> <p>“Somebody else mentioned drugs,” Boeker says. “They would put up a Beanie Baby and then they would sell them drugs, but it looked like they were buying a Beanie Baby. I don’t do drugs, so I don’t know.”</p> <p>In 2018, the trio got Business Insider to correct a video on Beanie Baby valuations that featured Lori Ann Verderame, known professionally as Dr. Lori, a television personality and antiques appraiser. In the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/videos/misc/we-got-our-beanie-baby-collections-valued/videoshow/66189045.cms">video</a>, which was removed from most platforms, Dr. Lori, who also markets herself as a Beanie Baby appraiser, declared a certain Valentino bear worth $100. Business Insider’s <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-beanie-babies-collection-worth-2018-9">correction</a> notes its actual value is more like $5 to $10.</p> <p>The Beanie Babies price guide ladies are hesitant to say much about Dr. Lori — after all, they are rivals. And most Beanie Baby people are, well, nice. Boeker says that while Dr. Lori does know about art and antiques, she is not an expert on Beanies. “She’s a smart woman,” she says. “But I don’t know of a single collector who respects her.”</p> <p>Dr. Lori, for her part, tells me that she appraises thousands of Beanie Babies a week. She acknowledges that there’s a lot of confusion around value, though when I asked for a more concrete sense of what makes a Beanie Baby valuable, she was relatively scant on details, insisting instead that people just get her appraisal. “You could have the winning lottery ticket, and a lot of people [do],” she says.</p> <p>Boeker says that they sometimes have people come to the Facebook group who have gotten appraisals from Dr. Lori for much higher than what other people are generally willing to pay. “Rarely are the prices she gives accurate,” Boeker says. “She’s making money, good for her.”</p> <p>Karen, Karen, and Becky don’t typically do appraisals; so many people have common Beanies, it’s not really worth it. The price guide costs money, though, as does the authentication service.</p> <p>Most collectors trust them, but to a point. Leon Schlossberg runs a <a href="http://www.tycollector.com/about-us.htm">website</a> dedicated to Ty and has with his daughter Sondra collected nearly 19,000 Beanie Babies, <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/kzxw9m/this-family-wants-to-open-a-beanie-baby-museum">which they hope to someday put into a museum</a>. He says that Boeker is “extraordinarily knowledgeable” about Beanie Babies and that the Beanie Babies price guide is the only one that’s legitimate out there, though he has quibbles with it. Still, he doesn’t love the idea that the women are both tracking the prices and selling — or at least, Boeker is. “You have to look at somebody who sells those for a living and wonder if that’s the person who should be making the value guide,” he says.</p> <p>The point isn’t lost on Boeker, who brought up in one of our conversations that it’s a bit of a conflict of interest for her to sell Beanie Babies while at the same time working on the price guide and authentication. From time to time, there are flare-ups in the women’s Beanie Babies Collectors group on Facebook where potential sellers accuse buyers of undercutting prices in an attempt to later flip the Beanies. Boeker reassures me there’s no trickery going on — but she’s definitely come across some Beanies in the wild that are worth more than the asking price. “Let’s just say I’ve gotten some good deals,” she says.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" /> <p>The problem with bubbles is that even if at some point it becomes clear what’s going on, it’s impossible to gauge when the bubble will burst. If bubbles were predictable, people would start to sell early, and the bubble would self-implode. Obviously, they don’t. And what was in the bubble really never goes away. The objects themselves don’t disappear. They become zombies.</p> <p>“Beanie Babies are mostly not going to get tossed in the trash, they just dissipate out,” says Camerer, the California behavioral economist. “The technical definition of a bubble is that prices are above some fundamental, but that just begs the question of what is the fundamental? What’s the value?”</p> <p>For people into Beanie Babies now, the fundamentals don’t really matter. If the world moves on from something and you don’t, you don’t for a reason.</p> <p>Most of the Beanie Baby collectors I spoke to couldn’t specifically identify the impetus of their interest in the toys. Maybe a neighbor had one, or they saw it at a store, or their kids got into them. Many point to the economics and investment properties, but not all of them. Some collectors want cats or dragons or tie-dye bears not because they’re particularly valuable but simply because they like them.</p> <div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"> <figure class="e-image"><span class="e-image__inner"><span class="e-image__image" data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1642004365_8773_341315" data-cdata='{"asset_id":23150645,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/X1e-0Hp9FjeszstciRV977PBy3w=/0x0:892x1161/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZyHi1myeZyz8hD4JZT-7L8MLoE4=/0x0:892x1161/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GVO-wMKePgnlPJTjattTv01zkRw=/0x0:892x1161/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RSmsQJrd84N5jBeEhk8l3UXtr_g=/0x0:892x1161/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ztrUk_pLW7xlus2YS_ccEBZRk84=/0x0:892x1161/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/15Qrl3TaXhRfC3yqERk4dPZ9zo0=/0x0:892x1161/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/-hE4QXus8lFWwRytHpIxNnk8C5Y=/0x0:892x1161/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/q2saCWIhZbvqyfzAjT3mzAHx6IU=/0x0:892x1161/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5jcmKZVb_AuWk3KwgxUxvWfdeh0=/0x0:892x1161/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="892" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/U3V58KXWwEIv1BESau89zv0513Y=/0x0:892x1161/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2VKOR3rywMvtdLGAjv_k3gXXojY=/0x0:892x1161/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5OqplaFXwvDkds1obnLOvEKg514=/0x0:892x1161/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1n3fA0-Rs4pUXWP5cCkA_YDZj4g=/0x0:892x1161/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pge1iPNNYSX7hqRqPbei1_nhTn8=/0x0:892x1161/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pP0FYpAeo4S1bYSrzAzZMPI2a90=/0x0:892x1161/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cg9jDxIg7kkgNUk0NhzWk_l1NWQ=/0x0:892x1161/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/a0YoSQUtKRL8K9l9ieCt42i-v4E=/0x0:892x1161/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wVXBR0Q49BQDd5njlZzmqO6kJJU=/0x0:892x1161/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Dub-5wrItGi5WLQF2jd9FJC4VNs=/0x0:892x1161/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:892x1161):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23150645/bear.png 1920w" /></picture></span></span></figure> </div> <p>Many collectors insist that there’s no real personal attachment to their Beanies, even though it’s impossible to imagine there isn’t. People don’t spend hours and hours learning the intricacies of any market for nothing, let alone a market as cold as Beanies. They like the hobby, but they also recognize it’s a bit silly — multiple people were skeptical that I might make them look bad in print. On the spectrum of habits, collecting stuffed animals is a healthy one; it’s also one where you might recognize others could think you’re a kook.</p> <p>If you think about it, the way we value anything is sort of strange. Value is, to a large extent, ineffable. The most valuable things in my life aren’t actually worth a lot of money. Are yours?</p> <p>Estenssoro says beyond a handful of Beanies she has “in a box somewhere tucked away,” she no longer collects them. The same goes for Holmes, who sold her collection about 12 years ago before having open-heart surgery because she wasn’t sure she’d make it through. She got two Chef Robuchons off her hands at the time.</p> <p>Boeker, however, hasn’t been able to give the hobby up. She had to sell off her collection some 20 years ago to pay off medical bills after having an emergency appendectomy while uninsured. “It was awful, back when I sold it,” she says. “I was in tears, I’ll admit that.” Slowly but surely, she’s built her collection back up.</p> <p>Recently, she sold some of her Beanie Babies, but for a happier reason: Her son got married, and she was able to turn about a dozen pieces in her collection into $15,000 for the occasion. “When you can do things like that, it’s worth it.” (In gratitude, the bride and groom allowed her to decorate their table with a pair of Love Birds Beanies.)</p> <p>Boeker has a self-effacing nature that’s disarming in conversation. She delivers some of her commentary with a metaphorical eye-roll, even though she clearly cares and has encyclopedic knowledge about Beanie Babies. “I know, shoot me,” she says when we first talk about her decision to start buying Beanies again after first selling her collection. Weeks later, she told me having to sell off her collection was probably one of the best things that ever happened to her because of the relationships she’s built over the years upon rebuilding it. “If you would have told me 25 years ago that I’d still be doing Beanies, I’d have called you crazy,” she says. She has no intention of getting out of the hobby anytime soon.</p> <p>The most important Beanie to her is, unsurprisingly, one I’ve never heard of: <a href="https://beaniebabiespriceguide.com/authentic-ty-billionaire-3-bear-beanie-baby/">Billionaire Bear No. 3</a>. According to the price guide, just 650 of those No. 3 bears were given out, and only to Ty employees. Boeker thinks she knows which employee hers went to. It’s worth an estimated $400 to $800, which is money, but not Chef Robuchon money. So why that one? In part, because Boeker bought it from the other Karen, Karen Holmes, who is her friend. “It’s special to me because it was owned by her.”</p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22870250/nft-beanie-baby-price-guide-bubble-princess-value">https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22870250/nft-beanie-baby-price-guide-bubble-princess-value</a>

vox After the Beanie Baby bubble burst

“It’s just so sad to see somebody spend so much money on something that isn’t real.” That’s what Karen Boeker, counterfeit Beanie Baby exper...

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The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages

<p><strong>Runaway house price inflation continues to characterize the U.S. market. House prices across the country rose 15.8% on average in October 2021 from the year before.</strong></p> <p>U.S. house prices are far over their 2006 Bubble peak, and remain over the Bubble peak even after adjustment for consumer price inflation. They will keep on rising at the annual rate of 14–16% for the rest of 2021, according to the AEI Housing Center.</p> <p>Unbelievably, in this situation the Federal Reserve keeps on buying mortgages. It buys a lot of them and continues to be the price-setting marginal buyer or Big Bid in the mortgage market, expanding its mortgage portfolio with one hand, and printing money with the other. It should have stopped before now, but the purchases, financed by newly created fiat money, or monetization, go on. They proceed at the rate of tens of billions of dollars a month, stoking the house price inflation, making it harder and harder for new families to afford a house. A recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece was entitled “How the Fed Rigs the Bond Market”—it rigs the mortgage market, too.</p> <p>The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve has grown to a size that would have amazed previous generations of Federal Reserve governors and economists. Although we have become somewhat accustomed to it, so fast do perceptions adjust, it would also have surprised readers of Housing Finance International of five years ago, and readers of 15 years ago would probably have judged the current reality simply impossible. Over time, we keep discovering how feeble are our judgments of what is possible or impossible.</p> <p>The total assets of the Federal Reserve reached $8.7 trillion in November 2021. This is just about double the $4.5 trillion of November 2016, five years before—and we thought it was really big then. Today’s Federal Reserve assets are ten times what they were in November 2006, 15 years ago, when they were $861 billion, and none were mortgages.</p> <p>The Federal Reserve now owns on its balance sheet $2.6 trillion in mortgages. That means about 24% of all outstanding residential mortgages in this whole big country reside in the central bank, which has thereby earned the remarkable status of becoming by far the largest savings and loan institution in the world. Like the historical U.S. savings and loans associations, the Federal Reserve owns very long-term mortgages, with their interest rates fixed for 15 to 30 years, and neither marks its investments to market in its financial statements nor hedges its substantial interest rate risk. It accounts for its mortgages at par value, not what it paid for them, and separately reports $338 billion of unamortized premiums (net of discounts) on securities—presumably a significant proportion of this is premiums paid on mortgages and thus additional investment in them.</p> <p>This $2.6 trillion in mortgages is 48% more than the Federal Reserve’s $1.76 trillion of five years ago, and of course, infinitely greater than the zero of 2006. Remember that from the founding of the Federal Reserve until then, the number of mortgages it owned had always been zero. That was what was normal. Whether moving into directly subsidizing mortgages and inflating the price of houses be considered progress or deterioration, or perhaps first the former and then the latter, it was certainly a big change. It was an emergency action in both the financial crisis of 2007–09 and the financial panic of 2020. Should a giant Federal Reserve mortgage portfolio be permanent or temporary? If temporary, how long should it go on?</p> <h4><strong>The Cincinnatian Problem</strong></h4> <p>An abiding problem is how you can reverse central bank and government crisis interventions, initially thought and meant to be temporary, after the crisis passes. The idea that government intervention, required in times of crisis, should be withdrawn in the renewed normal times which follow, I call the Cincinnatian Doctrine. It is named for the ancient Roman hero Cincinnatus, who was called from his plow to save the State, became temporary Dictator, did save the State, and then, mission accomplished, went back to his farm. (I introduced this term at the IUHF World Congress in 2006, just before the housing bubble of the time imploded.)</p> <div class="fzlYdTzE"><a href="https://www.infowarsstore.com/specials-clearance/new-years-super-special?ims=cuzeh&utm_campaign=heronewyear&utm_source=Infowars+Hero&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=heronewyear" target="_blank"><img src="https://api.directus.libertycdn.com/uploads/_/originals/3-InfowarsNewyearsSpecial-hero-385.jpg" /></a></div> <p>However sincere the intent that they should be temporary, the emergency interventions inevitably build up economic and political constituencies who profit from them and want them continued indefinitely. The difficulty of winding them back down, once they have become established, I call the Cincinnatian Problem. There is no easy answer to the problem. How, so to speak, do you get the Federal Reserve to go back to its farm, once it has enjoyed becoming the dominant mortgage investor in the world?</p> <p>In the 1960s, the Congress pushed the Federal Reserve to support the housing market by buying the debt issues (not mortgages) of Fannie Mae and other federal agencies involved with housing. The Federal Reserve of the time resisted. Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin testified that such an idea would “violate a fundamental principle of sound monetary policy in that it would attempt to use the credit-creating powers of the central bank to subsidize programs benefitting special sectors of the economy.”</p> <p>That seems to me exactly the right principle for normal times. In the last two crises, the Federal Reserve has decided to do precisely the opposite, that is “to use the credit-creating powers of the central bank to subsidize” a particularly political sector of the economy, namely housing finance. When the crises are over, and the interventions have become huge distortions, what next? Can we now even imagine a Federal Reserve which owns zero mortgages? At this point, can the Federal Reserve itself imagine that?</p> <h4><strong>“Tapering”</strong></h4> <p>In November 2021, the Federal Reserve belatedly announced it would begin to “taper” its purchases of mortgages (as well as of Treasury debt) and in December announced further that it would “taper” more quickly. This still means with ongoing, unabated inflation in house prices, the Federal Reserve is going to continue buying mortgages—only it will buy less than before. It will reduce the rate at which it increases its mortgage portfolio.</p> <p>Specifically, the Federal Reserve had been buying enough mortgages to make its portfolio go up by $40 billion a month, after replacing all principal repayments and prepayments. Now the net increase will be reduced by $10 billion a month. If it proceeds at this rate, the Federal Reserve will add $60 billion to its mortgage portfolio over three months before getting to a zero net addition. What happens then? Will it keep buying to maintain the size of its massive portfolio? Will it let the portfolio run off?—which would take a long time, perhaps lasting to the next financial crisis. Will it ever sell a single mortgage security? I believe nobody knows, including the Federal Reserve.</p> <p>Our closing questions on the outlook are: If the Federal Reserve stops being the Big Bid for mortgages, how much higher will mortgage interest rates go from their present abnormally low level? When the mortgage rates rise, how quickly will the house price inflation end? Will it reverse? How will the Federal Reserve, and the country, address their Cincinnatian Problem?</p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/the-federal-reserve-keeps-buying-mortgages">https://www.infowars.com/posts/the-federal-reserve-keeps-buying-mortgages</a>

news The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages

Runaway house price inflation continues to characterize the U.S. market. House prices across the country rose 15.8% on average in October 20...

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How Easy Money Inflated Corporate Profits

<p><strong>In the incessant media discussion about whether inflation is transitory there is a big elephant in the room about which all are silent.</strong></p> <p>Perhaps strangely some do not see it. Others for whatever reason pretend it is not there. The elephant is the fantastic surge in US corporate profits that monetary inflation has fueled during the second year of the pandemic. This elephant’s unremarked appearance is likely transitory, unlike the simultaneous jump in US consumer prices.</p> <p>Transitoriness is the essential theme of the contemporary Fed show—a point it has in common with Arthur Miller’s <em>Death of a Salesman</em>. There antihero Willy Lowman laments that in the twilight of his working life he still feels “temporary.” The Fed show, though, fits best into the theater of the absurd. The big elephant occupies a large part of the stage, but the characters never acknowledge its existence.</p> <p>Instead, the lead character, Jerome Powell, spends spring, summer, and autumn 2021 telling all that the contemporaneous jump in consumer prices is transitory. In no way does he mean goods and services prices on average will fall back down to prepandemic levels once the notorious bottlenecks resolve themselves. Instead, his long testimonies contain promises about how the Fed can use its toolboxes to ensure that prices will follow a gently sloping upward plateau after the rapidly approaching peak of the pandemic hill. </p> <p>Now in time for his renomination hearing in the Senate, Chief Powell publicly repents for having estimated that the peak was always just a short distance ahead when in reality the rise ahead of prices was still steep and far. Accordingly, he would have his listeners believe that the Federal Reserve is now making a hawkish pivot. The 2 percent inflation standard did not collapse; rather, it was suspended and it is now to be restored.</p> <p>Readers can judge for themselves the authenticity of that repentance. Skeptics complain that the chief’s confessions ring hollow where big government (in which the Fed forms a key component) has collected record inflation tax revenue and its cronies have thrived among the bonanza in profits.</p> <p>Perhaps, were truth known, the Fed did not plan back in spring 2020, when devising their “anticovid stimulus,” a huge inflation tax nor a profits bonanza. Yet the pressures of self-interest and big government interest around the Fed policy-making machine are surely a serious factor explaining why Chief Powell and his colleagues were so slow to even consider “normalization.”</p> <p>Bluntly, when the Fed machinery of money is splurging out fantastic profits amid understandable praise from the powerful beneficiaries, why hurry to make an exit from emergency stimulus? Alex Pollock describes this failure of the Fed to promptly normalize once the economic spasm of spring 2020 passed as a travesty of the “Cincinnatian doctrine.” Having heeded the desperate call of the early Roman Republic to save it from disaster, General Cincinnatus, immediately the mission is accomplished, relinquishes his role as dictator and returns to retirement on his farm.</p> <div class="J2enyCKK"><a href="https://www.infowarsstore.com/specials-clearance/new-years-super-special?ims=cuzeh&utm_campaign=heronewyear&utm_source=Infowars+Hero&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=heronewyear" target="_blank"><img src="https://api.directus.libertycdn.com/uploads/_/originals/3-InfowarsNewyearsSpecial-hero-385.jpg" /></a></div> <p>The powers behind the Fed’s pandemic emergency program are not back at the farm, unless we include President Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary, now back in the private equity industry—the epicenter of gains from monetary inflation. Most likely Congress will congratulate Chief Powell for his continuing readiness to “serve the public.” But in the markets beyond, the stunning size of the elephant in the room must surely have gained notice from investors and been a factor in the US equity market’s fantastic performance continuing through the second year of the pandemic.</p> <p>According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis quarterly reports, US corporate profits increased from $2.254 trillion in 2019 (the whole year before the pandemic) to $3.114 trillion annualized in Q3 of 2021; almost all of that surge occurred in the period between winter 2021 and autumn 2021. Making the normal adjustments for inventory valuations and depreciation, “adjusted” corporate profits rose from $2.368 trillion to $2.916 trillion.</p> <p>The reason for the smaller adjusted profits rise is that the Bureau of Economic Analysis statisticians adjust the adjusted profits down for the increasing costs of replacing inventories due to higher prices and the increased cost of eventually replacing capital goods due to their rise in prices. Even so, that inflation-adjusted rise in corporate profits exceeds 25 percent, notwithstanding the fact that annualized real GDP in Q3 of 2021 was only 2.5 percent ahead of 2019 as a whole (in nominal terms 8.5 percent).</p> <p>One part of this story, of course, is the fantastic boom in demand for home digital technology coupled with monopoly power in some cases of the suppliers of this—one could think of Microsoft, Apple, and perhaps Amazon Web Services in this regard, among others. There has also been the boom in digital advertising, translating into fantastic profit gains for the near-monopoly suppliers of this, though there could be offsets in loss of advertising revenues for alternative media.</p> <p>The scale of the profits boom overall, however, goes well beyond this core, as evidenced also by stellar earnings growth, say, for the universe of US small and midcapitalization companies in general. </p> <p>How has monetary inflation driven this profits boom? </p> <p>Quite simply demand across an array of business sectors has surged (one factor here has been the tremendous growth in demand for consumer durables) albeit offset in part by demand weakness elsewhere especially for service output suffering from infection risk, while a range of factors (including so-called global bottlenecks) have been constraining supply. The new money demand has entered the system in a way which has driven up profit margins and corporate revenues. We should include here the spending out of fantastic wealth gains, whether in equities, real estate, or the crypto space, even if much of this is ultimately illusory. </p> <p>Should we expect this profits surge to last, or to reverse itself? </p> <p>In a competitive capitalist system, there would be little doubt about the answer. Competitive forces would erode actual record profit margins. But at a time when monetary inflation has persisted so long (and this far predates the pandemic) together with the natural hazards of monopoly empowerment which digitalization causes, the answer is not so clear. We should consider here monopoly in the form of entrenched advantages for the so-called star firm in many industrial sectors, which assembles specific technology inputs which cannot be easy replicated by outsiders. </p> <p>Even so, the monetary dynamics of inflation are such as that the initial profit surge tends to get reversed. Demand does not continue to far outstrip supply. As prices adjust upward across an increasing range, real purchasing power of the new money created diminishes. As expectations of high inflation broaden out, or alternatively more economic agents become fully aware of the inflation environment in which they operate, firms able initially to drive up their profits find they are constrained in this by rising pressure on their costs.</p> <p>Yet present market pricing does not indicate any expectation of reversion to mean of profits under such forces—the trailing price earnings ratio on the S&P 500 from end-2019 to end-2021 rose from around 25 to 29. This extrapolative characteristic of present earnings expectations and absence of any apparent weighty expectations of earnings “reverting to a mean” suggest how presently powerful asset inflation could reverse itself even without substantial “monetary policy normalization.”</p> <p>The catalyst to asset market deflation would be a dose of reality which prompts first of all the US equity market space. Perceptions there would shift. The elephant—the giant profits surge of 2021—would lose its permanence and become transitory in appearance.</p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/how-easy-money-inflated-corporate-profits-2">https://www.infowars.com/posts/how-easy-money-inflated-corporate-profits-2</a>

news How Easy Money Inflated Corporate Profits

In the incessant media discussion about whether inflation is transitory there is a big elephant in the room about which all are silent. Per...

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There It Is: Biden Says He Backs Changes To Senate Rules To Ram Through Election ‘Reform’ Bill

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://api-assets.infowars.com/2022/01/biden29476187890.jpg" /></div> <p><strong>Joe Biden finally threw his support behind Democrat efforts to change Senate rules to ram through their “election reform” bill without Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.</strong></p> <p>“Today I’m making it clear. To protect our democracy, I support changing the Senate rules whichever way they need to be changed to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights!” Biden told the small crowd in Atlanta on Tuesday.</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" readability="7.807570977918"> <p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">There it is:</p> <p>Joe Biden forcefully says the Senate should get rid of the filibuster so Democrats can pass their bill federalizing elections, eliminating election integrity laws, watering down voter ID laws and keeping Democrats in power forever. <a href="https://t.co/mRgcoPbBMp">pic.twitter.com/mRgcoPbBMp</a></p> — Greg Price (@greg_price11) <a href="https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1481018616548106241?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 11, 2022</a></blockquote> <p>“We have no option but to change the Senate rules— including getting rid of the filibuster for this. I’m tired of being quiet!”</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" readability="6.1538461538462"> <p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">BIDEN: "We have no option but to change the Senate rules— including getting rid of the filibuster"</p> <p>*then coughs* <a href="https://t.co/dgGW5LubFG">pic.twitter.com/dgGW5LubFG</a></p> — Benny (@bennyjohnson) <a href="https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1481021362256891908?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 11, 2022</a></blockquote> <p>“This matters to all of us. The goal of the former president and his allies is to disenfranchise anyone who votes against him, simple as that,” the puppet president claimed.</p> <p>Biden then suggested that Senate Republicans are “domestic enemies” for not supporting the Democrats’ John Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2021.</p> <p>“Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch,” he declared. “I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies foreign, yes and domestic! And so the question is where will the institution of the United States Senate stand?”</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" readability="4.5681818181818"> <p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">Joe Biden says Americans who are opposed to his radical election overhaul bills are domestic enemies. <a href="https://t.co/Lv31JYUk29">pic.twitter.com/Lv31JYUk29</a></p> — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) <a href="https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1481019222297923585?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 11, 2022</a></blockquote> <p>Senate rules require 60 votes to pass most legislation — a threshold Senate Democrats can’t meet alone due to their slim 50-50 majority with VP Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker.</p> <p>Which is why Democrat leadership for weeks has been <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/hypocrisy-schumer-says-senate-to-vote-on-repealing-filibuster-despite-warning-move-is-doomsday-to-democracy/" target="_blank">calling for changes to the Senate rules</a> ahead of the midterms, which <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-preferred-double-digit-margin-control-congress-instead-democrats-poll-1658516" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">polling suggests</a> Republicans will sweep in both chambers of Congress.</p> <p>And with <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2022/01/biden-approval-rating-dropped-30-points-in-2021-worst-dive-in-75-years/" target="_blank">Biden’s approval at historic lows</a> and the midterm elections less than a year away, Democrats are determined to shut out half of the Senate to pass their radical bills ensuring they don’t lose power.</p> <p><strong>Watch Biden’s full remarks:</strong></p> [embedded content] <hr class="wp-block-separator" /> <p><em><a href="https://freeworldnews.tv/watch?id=61d87f077c3ca95fc55122c8" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Washington Governor Pushes Bill To Criminalize Questioning Election Integrity</a></em></p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/there-it-is-biden-says-he-backs-changes-to-senate-rules-to-ram-through-election-reform-bill">https://www.infowars.com/posts/there-it-is-biden-says-he-backs-changes-to-senate-rules-to-ram-through-election-reform-bill</a>

news There It Is: Biden Says He Backs Changes To Senate Rules To Ram Through Election ‘Reform’ Bill

Joe Biden finally threw his support behind Democrat efforts to change Senate rules to ram through their “election reform” bill without Repu...

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Omicron is exploding. Here’s what to do if you’ve been exposed.

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/nfEhNAduH9fun6CA_WlsR4n3nOY=/0x302:4800x2815/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23159639/GettyImages_1237550312.jpg" /></div> <p>If you find out you’ve been exposed to someone who’s tested positive for Covid-19, a rush of questions might come to mind: Do I have to quarantine? What if I can’t find a good mask or a test? Even if I test negative, can I be certain that I’m not contagious?</p> <p>With omicron causing <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home">record-shattering case growth</a> over the past few weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s1227-isolation-quarantine-guidance.html">guidelines</a> about what to do after exposure have shifted, and they remain frustratingly unclear. The last thing anyone wants to do when they’ve just learned they’ve been exposed is to dig through a bunch of confusing guidelines.</p> <p>Yet we all need to know what to do in this situation. Even if you’re not worried about omicron’s effects on you personally — maybe because it <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22849891/omicron-pandemic-endemic">appears to be milder</a>, because you’re in a low-risk group, or because you think Covid-19 is inescapable at this point — it’s crucial to do all you reasonably can to avoid spreading it to others right now, especially anyone who might be elderly, immunocompromised, or unvaccinated. Testing capacity is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/us/politics/us-covid-tests-omicron.html">currently very strained</a> and some hospitals are already running out of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/09/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html">staffing</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/omicron-mild-hospital-strain-health-care-workers/621193/">beds</a>. It’s really important that we not contribute to that crunch.</p> <p>Experts aren’t suggesting Americans have to go back to a March 2020-style lockdown. Unlike at the start of the pandemic, we have vaccines and boosters that are <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/31/omicron-hospitalization-risk-upside-vaccine-protection-good-uk-study-.html">highly effective</a> at preventing serious illness and death. But they are advising people to be thoughtful about risk right now — both in terms of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22849891/omicron-pandemic-endemic">precautions we take to avoid being exposed to omicron</a>, and in terms of what we do if we have been exposed.</p> <p>So, to get some clarity on what we should do in the immediate aftermath of an exposure, I asked three epidemiologists what they themselves would do. As you’ll see, there’s a spectrum of views here; within this spectrum, you can decide where you fall depending on your own risk calculus, the people you come in contact with, and the community spread in your area.</p> <p>There’s broad unanimity on this front. “Don’t run to get tested. And don’t panic,” said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.</p> <p>If you spent time indoors with someone and then find out they’ve tested positive, it’s possible you might get Covid-19 from the exposure, but you won’t test positive immediately after it. So if it’s only been a day or two since your exposure, the thing to focus on first is not testing, but the possibility of needing to quarantine — and the certainty of needing a good mask.</p> <p>If you’re unvaccinated, or are vaccinated with two doses but not yet boosted, you should quarantine for five days and continue to wear a mask around others for five more days after that.</p> <p>If you’re boosted, then you don’t need to quarantine, according to the CDC guidelines. But you should still wear a mask around others for 10 days after the exposure.</p> <p>And yes, “wear a mask around others” includes others in your home — like children or roommates — if possible. Dowdy acknowledged that’s hard to do, but said his family did it when one of them recently had Covid-19: They opened the windows in the house, wore N95s, and slept in different rooms. “Not everyone will be able to do this,” he said, “but for those who can, it’s the ideal way to halt transmission.”</p> <p>All that said, the CDC guidance has also led to other questions.</p> <p>When I asked the epidemiologists whether they agreed with the CDC on this point, they expressed a range of opinion.</p> <p>“I think this is a safe bet. Boosters prevent infection from omicron very well,” <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/">Katelyn Jetelina</a>, an infectious diseases epidemiologist with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, told me by email. In other words, if you’re boosted, the chance that you’ll spread the omicron variant is significantly lowered because there’s a lower chance of you becoming infected with it in the first place.</p> <p>Dowdy, for his part, said of the CDC guidance, “I think this is reasonable, depending on the level of transmission in your area. If you’re in the midst of a hot spot, it probably makes sense to quarantine even if you are vaccinated. But if transmission levels are low, this is reasonable advice.”</p> <p>He added that it’s important to consider a couple of other factors in making your personal decision: first, whether you frequently come into contact with other people who could get really sick if they got infected, and second, if it’s been more than a few months since your last vaccine dose. “In either of these cases, it makes sense to quarantine, even if you are vaccinated,” he said.</p> <p>Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University, told me she doesn’t think we have enough data about omicron to know if the CDC’s advice is solid. “If you can quarantine, I would still recommend it,” she said.</p> <p>“We did when we had an exposure just before Christmas. We all ended up negative but did not want to take the chance of spreading virus, and were off work and school with the holiday so that was easy for us,” she said. “Understandably, not everyone can do that, especially as many employers will no longer allow such measures. That’s why it’s important to be diligent about masking.”</p> <p>The best time to get tested seems to be about five days after exposure (or at any time after a fever develops). Just remember that tests — especially <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22870328/how-to-use-rapid-tests-omicron">rapid antigen tests</a> — are not foolproof. “Testing negative doesn’t mean you can go mask-free. You should still mask around others in public” until it’s been 10 days since the exposure, Smith said. “Even with a negative test, if you have exposure and symptoms, it’s best to assume you are Covid-positive and act as such.”</p> <p>What about if you can’t get access to a test?</p> <p>In that case, Dowdy said, “The best thing to do is continue quarantine for 10 days after any exposure. If you haven’t developed symptoms within 10 days, it’s reasonable to end quarantine at that time.”</p> <p>With all of this, he said, there is a balance of risks and benefits — as well as personal circumstances — that must be assessed on an individual level. “What I’m describing is the ideal situation — for example, someone who can easily quarantine and continue working at home,” he said. “But most of us don’t live in those ideal situations, and it’s important for all of us to be understanding of others who may not have the same support systems that we have.”</p> <p>Jetelina agrees that if you have difficulty getting a test, you should assume that you are positive and isolate until you can get your hands on one. “If you’re still asymptomatic after five days (and still can’t get a test), you can stop isolation as long as you can wear a good mask for five more days,” she wrote, noting N95s are the best option.</p> <p>Both Jetelina and Smith were crystal-clear on this one: Yes!</p> <p>“This is incredibly important as you can still be infectious after five days,” Jetelina said.</p> <p>We’re still learning about the transmission dynamics of omicron, and although many people will probably stop being infectious before 10 days have passed, “wearing a mask during that period will help to reduce any chance of spreading the virus,” Smith explained.</p> <p>Dowdy noted that compared to other measures that could be enacted (like lockdowns), wearing a mask in public places is arguably not the hardest thing to do. So wearing a mask for 10 days is “the ideal,” he said, though he reemphasized the caveat that “we have to be understanding of people for whom this might not be possible.”</p> <p>The best bet is an N95. KN95 masks work great, too.</p> <p>Even though these masks are in high demand right now, you can still order them from mass suppliers like Walmart or Amazon, or from retailers like <a href="https://wellbefore.com/">WellBefore</a>, <a href="https://bonafidemasks.com/">Bona Fide Masks</a>, <a href="https://www.demetech.us/">DemeTECH</a>, and <a href="https://n95maskco.com/pages/shop-all-collections">N95 Mask Co</a>. (There may be a shipping lag for some of these masks, so even if you haven’t been exposed, it’s a good idea to stock up now so you’ll be prepared.)</p> <p>“Remember that the fit of the mask is just as important as the type of mask,” Dowdy said. “Wearing an N95 without fitting it to your face is defeating the purpose of wearing an N95 in the first place.”</p> <p>If you can’t get an N95 or a KN95, the next-best option is a tight-fitting surgical mask (see <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=450766222891597">this CDC video</a> on how to adjust a surgical mask to improve fit). Adding a cloth mask on top of your surgical mask will further help eliminate gaps around your face.</p> <p>If you’ve been exposed or tested positive, do not rely on a cloth mask alone to prevent you from spreading the virus to others.</p> <p>It’s important to remember that rapid tests aren’t perfect — and even with <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22790673/home-covid-tests-molecular-antigen-winter-holidays">more sensitive tests</a> like PCR, being negative one day doesn’t mean you won’t be positive in another day or two.</p> <p>“If you have symptoms or a close contact [with an infected person], I would not trust one negative test,” Jetelina said, adding that it’s a good idea to retest at least 24 hours later.</p> <p>Likewise, Smith said, “I would still try to mask around others if you have been exposed, when possible, especially if individuals you may spend time with are in high-risk categories.”</p> <p>She noted that there have been <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/12/24/2021.12.22.21268246.full.pdf">some</a> <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v1.full.pdf">reports</a> recently that sampling the nose isn’t sensitive enough early on to detect omicron infection, and that samples from the throat or saliva may detect it earlier. (Note that these reports are not yet peer-reviewed.) However, we don’t yet know if those early throat or saliva samples mean infected individuals are already spreading virus to others.</p> <p>According to Dowdy, it’s “really a judgment call at this point” whether you should feel comfortable visiting parents after one negative rapid test result. You have to consider your level of exposure, your parents’ health, how long and in what setting you’ll be seeing each other, and how both you and your parents weigh the value of seeing each other against the risk of them getting sick.</p> <p>“If your parents are relatively healthy and you haven’t been closely exposed (and are feeling well), it’s probably reasonable to trust that negative test result,” he said. “If your parents are much more frail and you’re living with someone who has Covid in your house, I’d wait.”</p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22872159/omicron-exposure-testing-masking-quarantine-cdc">https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22872159/omicron-exposure-testing-masking-quarantine-cdc</a>

vox Omicron is exploding. Here’s what to do if you’ve been exposed.

If you find out you’ve been exposed to someone who’s tested positive for Covid-19, a rush of questions might come to mind: Do I have to qua...

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Video: Joe Rogan Slams Kamala Harris As “Insane” For Comparing Jan 6th To 9/11

<p><strong>After encountering a huge backlash from conservatives for describing the events of January 6th 2021 as a “violent terrorist attack,” Senator Ted Cruz apologised and admitted that his language was “dumb” and “sloppy”.</strong></p> <p>Cruz appeared on Tucker Carlson’s evening show Thursday, apparently at his own request, and attempted to back track on what he said, claiming that he’d been referring to attacks on police.</p> <p>Carlson said to Cruz “There are a lot of dumb people in the Congress. You are not one of them. I think you’re smarter than I am. And you never use words carelessly. And yet you called this a terror attack when by no definition was it a terror attack. That’s a lie. You told that lie on purpose, and I’m wondering why you did.”</p> <p>Cruz responded “When you aired your episode last night, I sent you a text shortly thereafter and said listen, I would like to go on because the way I phrased things yesterday, it was sloppy, and it was frankly dumb.”</p> <p>Carlson interjected, urging “Look, I’ve known you a long time. Since before you went to the Senate, you’re a Supreme court contender. You take words as seriously as any man who’s ever served in the Senate. And every word you repeated that phrase. I do not believe that you use that accidentally. I just don’t.”</p> <p>Cruz again described his language as “a poor choice of words,” claiming that “as a result of my sloppy phrasing, it’s caused a lot of people to misunderstand what I meant.”</p> <p>“Let me tell you what I meant,” The Senator continued, explaining “What I was referring to are the limited number of people who engaged in violent attacks against police officers. I think you and I both agree that if you assault a police officer, you should go to jail.”</p> <p>“That’s who I was talking about. And the reason the phrasing was sloppy is I have talked dozens if not hundreds of times, I’ve drawn a distinction. I wasn’t saying that the thousands of peaceful protestors supporting Donald Trump are somehow terrorists. I wasn’t saying the millions of patriots across the country, supporting president Trump are terrorists,” Cruz declared, adding “And that’s what a lot of people have misunderstood that.”</p> <p>Carlson continued to say he doesn’t believe Cruz. “Hold on a second,” the host shot back, noting “What you just said doesn’t make sense. So if somebody assaults a cop, he should be charged and go to jail. I couldn’t agree more. We have said that for years, but that person’s still not a terrorist. How many people have been charged with terrorism on January 6?”</p> <p>Carlson continued, “Like why’d you use that word? You’re playing into the other side’s characterization, that… allows them to define an entire population as foreiegn combatants. And you know that so why’d you do it?”</p> <p>Cruz responded, “The reason I’ve used that word for a decade, I have referred to people who violently assault police officers as terrorists. I’ve done so over and over and over again. If you look at all the assaults we’ve seen across the country, I’ve called that terrorism over and over again.”</p> <p>The Senator continued, “That being said, Tucker, I agree with you. It was a mistake to say that yesterday. And the reason is what you just said, which is we’ve now had a year of Democrats in the media, twisting words, and trying to say that all of us are terrorists trying to say you’re a terrorist, I’m a terrorist.”</p> <p>“And so look, I don’t like people who assault cops and, and, and I stand up and defend cops,” Cruz carried on, adding “The reason I use that word is that’s the word I’ve always used for people that violently attack cops. But in this context, I get why people were angry because we’ve had a year of the corrupt corporate media and Democrats claiming anyone who objected to the election fraud.”</p> <p>“I guess I just don’t believe you,” Carlson said. “And I mean that with respect because I have such respect for your acuity and your precision.”</p> <p>Cruz also tweeted the interview out, saying his words were dumb:</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed-twitter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper" readability="7.1601208459215"> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true" readability="7.6374622356495"> <p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">I was NOT calling the thousands of peaceful protestors on Jan 6 terrorists. I would never do so; I have repeatedly, explicitly said the OPPOSITE—denouncing the Democrats’ shameful efforts to do so & to try to paint every Trump voter in America as “terrorists” & “insurrectionists”</p> — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) <a href="https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1479272471782170629?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2022</a></blockquote> </div> </figure> <figure class="wp-block-embed-twitter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper" readability="6.6082089552239"> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true" readability="6.6082089552239"> <p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">The snippet from yesterday didn’t include my passionate & repeated defense of the patriots and peaceful protestors supporting President Trump. I’m sorry that that 20-second clip led so many to misunderstand what I was saying.</p> — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) <a href="https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1479272473417900038?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2022</a></blockquote> </div> </figure> <p><strong>SUBSCRIBE on YouTube:</strong></p> Follow on Twitter: <p>———————————————————————————————————————<br /> Brand <strong>new merch</strong> now available! Get it at <a href="https://www.pjwshop.com/"><strong>https://www.pjwshop.com/</strong></a> <a href="https://www.pjwshop.com/"><img alt="PJW Shop" border="0" height="600" src="https://cdn.summit.news/2021/07/merch.jpg" width="348" /></a></p> <p><strong>ALERT!</strong> In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch.</p> <p>We need you to sign up for our free newsletter <a href="https://summit.news/newsletter">here</a>.</p> <p>Support our sponsor – <a href="https://bit.ly/TURBOFORCE">Turbo Force</a> – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown.</p> <p>Also, we urgently need your financial support <a href="https://www.subscribestar.com/paul-joseph-watson">here</a>. ———————————————————————————————————————</p> <br /> <br /> source <a href="https://summit.news/2022/01/11/video-joe-rogan-slams-kamala-harris-as-insane-for-comparing-jan-6th-to-9-11/">https://summit.news/2022/01/11/video-joe-rogan-slams-kamala-harris-as-insane-for-comparing-jan-6th-to-9-11/</a>

revolution summit Video: Joe Rogan Slams Kamala Harris As “Insane” For Comparing Jan 6th To 9/11

After encountering a huge backlash from conservatives for describing the events of January 6th 2021 as a “violent terrorist attack,” Senator...

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