Toy cats and economics

Somewhere in our travels we acquired some toy cats which eventually became Bryan's special friends. The first was a simple, pillow-like feline that Bryan named "Butterscotch." Butterscotch has led an interesting life, most recently traveling to Washington DC with me to attend a big conference. Here he is catching a few minutes of a Bulls game on the flatscreen in the fancy hotel.


And here he is relaxing before calling it a night.



The second cat was "Snip" and he's a "Beanie Baby." As you may recall, these little bead-filled cloth critters were all the rage back in the nineties, and you can see why after watching kids play with them. Bryan has been nuts about Snip, and he tells imaginative stories about how Snip does backflips, fights the bad guys, flies through the air, has ears with "magic powers," and makes cute little sounds. Sort of a cuddly ninja, a concept that speaks to the very depths of a four year old boy's soul.

Snip has become such a fixture in our family that John has attempted to lure Snip away from Bryan and into his own camp. At one point we decided we needed to provide some cats for John to ease the contention, so we logged onto ebay to test the market.

We found that the Beanie market has dropped considerably since its heyday. We found 12 of them for $10, which we decided was a pretty good deal. We snapped them up and about a week later, we had a dozen fabric kitties named things like "Zip," "Chip," "Flip," "Nip," "Pounce," "Prance," "Scat,"and even a brand new "Snip." The kids immediately "clipped" off the tags and started to snuggle.


When I came home from work and saw twelve heart-shaped tags lying around, I couldn't help but think of how those tags had been carefully preserved for about 10 years before meeting their fate. As you may recall, some people began to think of Beanie Babies as investments. I remember seeing a news story on TV (back when I watched network news) that reported how Beanies "NWT" going for hundreds of dollars each. One of the cardinal rules of maintaining your portfolio's value was keeping the tags on. If your tag was cut off or crinkled, the value went Enron. But eventually, the market fell out of the bottom anyway.

The real shame of the Beanie Baby bust is that it all happened before these government bailouts became so popular. If the market could have held on for a few years, those happless investors could have had some recourse. They could say how they were tricked into buying them, that the Beanie Baby company overpaid executives that new the end was coming soon, all the usual stuff. You can almost see those with especially big holdings carpooling to D.C. in their minivans to convince Congress that they needed some bailout bill bucks.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Doesn't it?