Re: [meteorite-list] Meteorite economics revisited

[Adam Hupe]

Commodity Definition A physical substance, such as food, grains, and metals, which is interchangeable with another product of the same type, and which investors buy or sell, through futures contracts. The price of the commodity is subject to supply and demand. Risk is actually the reason exchange trading of basic agricultural products began. For example, a farmer risks the cost of producing a product ready for market at sometime in the future because he doesn't know what the selling price will be. More generally, a product which trades on a commodity exchange, this would also include foreign currencies and financial instruments and indexes. This is the business definition of a commodity   ----- Original Message ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 11:07 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Meteorite economics revisited  [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: dealers sometimes do set the prices.  It then becomes a matter of trust for collectors that they are not paying too much.  Spoken from a true seller's perspective.  ;-)   Sellers can think that they set the prices, but they simply don't.  A dollar-per-gram number is not a true "price" until it's willingly paid, and only a buyer can decide to willingly pay.  If all "honest dealers" decided tomorrow (with no interference from "rogue" sellers ;-)  that the "price" of Gao was $10,000/gram, that would just be a number printed in a lot of catalogs, it wouldn't actually be "The Price of Gao".   It wouldn't be a dealer-decided price because no one would be paying it.  Dealers would have to keep lowering the price until buyers started consistently buying......voila, look who "set" the price. The standard business supply and demand argument only works for true commodities not for meteorites in all cases. This is because no two falls are alike just like no two pieces of fine art are alike.  Is fine art a commodity in the business sense?  Yes, it absolutely is.  I've been in the business side of the artistic community for thirty years, and I believe there are ZERO economic differences between art commerce and meteorite commerce and bread commerce and CD-player commerce  -  merely minor variations of the same unbreakable rules.   Gregory J. Gregory Wilson 2118 Wilshire Blvd. #918 Santa Monica, CA 90403