Stamp Market in Europe

Every year I try to go to a few European auctions, maybe buy a few things, but really more to get a sense of what major European sellers are saying and doing.  The sellers I met with in Europe are pessimistic.  And they have reason to be. The Euro crisis is weighing on European perceptions in a way that is difficult for Americans to understand. Perhaps the greatest international success of the last sixty years has been the integration of Europe culminating in the Euro. With our short term focus on the current events of today, we forget that Europe has been racked with strife for millennium and that, when historians five hundred years from now write about the last two centuries, the series of wars between the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and WW II (which includes WW I) will probably be seen as one large, long conflict related to European unity  (Remember, it is historians that name and group conflicts-the people  involved in The Hundred Years War didn’t think they were involved in over a century long conflict. Rather they saw it a a series of smaller wars that have been liked by later historians into a bigger pattern). Anyway, European optimism on integration and peace has been weakened and the people I spoke to are worried. Confidence is low and  business is very weak, but (and this is why I think the stamp market is so troubled over there) this hasn’t translated into lower asking prices for stamps. The auctioneer estimates struck me as very high, far higher than the same stamps can be bought here in the United States. So until  European sellers reduce their prices to reflect the realities of the market, business there will be slow.