Economist Writing Every Day

The emerging market in digital art as nonfungible tokens is the strongest signal of expected inflation I’ve seen to date.

Let’s back up.

Digital art is being sold as nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Is this a bubble? Don’t know. Is this art? Don’t care. Is a piece of digital art as an NFT harder easier or harder to duplicate? I imagine it is easier for the artist, but they have an incentive not to issue duplicates, because doing so erodes the market value of all future digital art NFTs the producer might issue. Is a piece of digital art as NFT harder to duplicate for a forger? I imagine so. The NFT as both art and artists signature is certainly harder to duplicate than traditional media and penmanship. Which is to say we have little reason to worry about the value of a piece of art being inflated away by the artist or criminal forgers.

Now that’s interesting.

The general rule of thumb is that the more consumption value a good offers, the worse it will perform, on average, as an investment. Art, baseball cards, comic books, vinyl records, memorabilia, homes – these are all generally inferior to equities as investments. It stands to reason, though I certainly haven’t checked, that the same logic applies to hedging against inflation as well. Precious metals, while less fun, should offer a superior hedge against inflation than art, particular in relation to art by living artists, where the supply is anything but fixed.

In this regard, however, NFTs are a bit of a game changer. The supply of any given Beeple NFT is fixed forever at one, and there is as yet no reason to believe otherwise. Storage and security costs approach zero, which is something that can’t be said about a 20-foot tall metallic balloon dog. The consumption value is subjective and I’ll leave it to market auctions to suss that out. The inflationary hedge value, however – in this manner NFTs may be an game-changing innovation for prominent living artists, allowing them to capture rents from the value they create that has previously eluded them prior to shedding their mortal coil.

The bond market isn’t giving unambiguous signals of inflationary pressures yet, but signs are creeping in, and among those signs I include seemingly rabid excitement for mixing cultural-status consumption with cryptocurrency-enabled hedges against the prospect of what would be the first real wave of inflation we’ve seen in 40 years.

Which is a long winded way of saying I’m not rooting for inflation, but I’d also be happy to sell my mint-condition complete set of 1987 Fleer baseball cards if you’re looking to hedge your portfolio.