Over the past decade, investors have made great returns in the collectables market. But in 2019, the market has turned on its head. For the first time since the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the collectables market is down. Only a few winners have emerged this year, among them are Claude Monet’s paintings, bottles of The Macallan Scotch whisky, and James Bond.
The most obvious reason for the slowdown: the world economic slowdown. Sliding global markets checked rich collectors in 2019 just as they had a decade earlier. In 2008–09, says consultancy Arts Economics, “all segments of the market dropped in value”, with art objects valued at more than US$1 million dropping by an average 54 per cent.
The slowdown since late 2018 is far less severe so far. But consultancy Capgemini estimates that high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) – those with financial assets above US$1 million – saw their net wealth drop by three per cent or US$2 trillion in 2018, the first such drop since 2011. Collectors have remained cautious through 2019 amid rising political instability, trade tensions and a continuing slowdown in Chinese growth.
China is now one of the big three markets for collectables, along with the US and the UK; and in relation to that, when their buyers retreat, markets suffer. So, in 2019 the classic car market is sputtering, coins have stopped rising, and whisky – the biggest recent collectables boom market – is no longer pouring out profits. Even fine art, a huge market almost always hard to assess, appears to have seen lower prices this year.
ART: MONEY FOR MONET
Fine art is the juggernaut of the collectables market. Late 2018’s mammoth New York spring auction of items from the Rockefeller estate garnered US$833 million – the highest-ever auction total for a single collection as tracked by Art Market Research’s Veronika Lukasova-Duthy.
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