Buy It Now Price: $300 (price as of 2019; item no longer available)
Pros:
-This World War II era Eversharp Skyline fountain pen and pencil set from 1943 features sleek navy blue barrels accented with gold filled trim.
-This Eversharp Skyline fountain pen is a shorter demi size, measuring 4.88 inches (12.4 cm) long when capped and 5.25 inches (13.3 cm) long when posted. The matching mechanical pencil is 4.75 inches (12.1 cm) long.
-The American pen company Eversharp manufactured the Skyline series of pens in a dizzying array of style and color combinations between 1941 and 1948. Designed by the renowned industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, the Eversharp Skyline was lauded for its groundbreaking, streamlined profile.
-This Eversharp Skyline fountain pen and mechanical pencil set is new old stock in its original box. It is absolutely pristine and has never been inked – a near miracle considering it is over 75 year old! The only exception to the set’s perfect condition is some minor toning on the gold-filled trim.
-The Eversharp Skyline was a commercial hit, and quickly became the United State’s best selling pen by the mid 1940s.
-These Eversharp Skyline models have wide band trim, which is less common than the company’s thin band trim.
-This 1940s Eversharp Skyline fountain pen has a solid 14 karat gold medium nib. Vintage Eversharp pens were considered excellent writers in their time and are highly prized by today’s fountain pen enthusiasts for this attribute.
-The clips on both the pen and pencil have the double checkmark logo, indicating that they were backed by Eversharp’s lifetime warranty.
-Both the pen and pencil retain their original paper price tags. The pen retailed for $9.75 when new in 1943 while the pencil sold for $5.00. When adjusted for inflation in 2019, these values would be $146 and $75, respectively.
-Neither vintage writing implement has a monogram or other personalization. This is a nice plus as it can be challenging to find older pens without engraved initials.
-Although the asking price of $300 is a bit high compared to many Eversharp Skyline fountain pen sets in the marketplace, I would be willing to pay the premium in light of this set’s exceptional condition. I have learned the hard way that when you find a remarkable antique, you had better pay the seller’s asking price or risk losing the gem forever.
Cons:
-This Eversharp Skyline fountain pen and pencil set is a pen connoisseur’s dream, but due to its unused condition there is no way any serious collector would consider using it as a daily writer. If that’s what you’re after, you’ll have to find a different vintage pen.
Helicopter money is a term popularized by the former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in his 2002 speech, “Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here“. This speech outlined policies that the Fed could pursue to ensure that deflation didn’t take root in the U.S., thus (hopefully) avoiding the same financial misery that plagued Japan since its twin stock market/property market bubble burst in the early 1990s.
I will quote a relevant excerpt from the talk that Bernanke delivered to the National Economists Club in Washington, D.C.:
“…U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. …If we do fall into deflation…we can take comfort that the logic of the printing press example must assert itself, and sufficient injections of money will ultimately always reverse a deflation.”
It is important to point out how radical this financial theory really was at the time. Over the course of the 20th century, central banks have learned the hard lesson that monetizing government debt – buying significant quantities of government bonds either directly from the national treasury or from the secondary market – inevitably leads to the eventual destruction of the currency. In other words, monetizing government debt (aka helicopter money) is nothing more than ugly inflationism that gradually impoverishes a nation.
Although Bernanke’s speech never explicitly mentioned the term “helicopter money”, the concept has nonetheless become intimately associated with his extremist approach to dealing with potentially deflationary economic situations.
The Federal Reserve got a chance to try out Bernanke’s flawed monetary policies after the U.S. housing bubble popped in 2008. This bursting bubble ushered in the country’s most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, Bernanke’s helicopters only dropped money over Wall Street, while Main Street USA was curiously left off the list of money drop destinations.
This was a feature, not a bug.
The Federal Reserve pushed short term interest rates to almost zero for a full 8 years, depriving savers, retirees and the prudent of desperately needed interest income while simultaneously enriching the big banks via inflated net interest margins. The Fed didn’t stop there though. They also engaged in Quantitative Easing, or “QE” for short, where they printed trillions of dollars out of thin air and purchased Treasury and mortgage securities from cash-strapped banks. And then the Fed doubled down by giving trillions more dollars of effectively interest-free loans to banks, insurance companies and other vaguely financial institutions – like the motorcycle maker Harley Davidson!
A Graph of the Federal Funds Rate from 2007 to 2018
Even the U.S. Government had a helicopter money drop of its own when Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which authorized the Treasury to inject up to $700 billion of taxpayer money into banks to make sure they didn’t receive their just desserts (which were bankruptcy, followed by liquidation).
I do have a point with this financial history lesson, so please stay with me.
You see, the excessive debt loads that caused the global economy to grind to a halt in 2008 were never resolved. Instead, the central bankers of the world, in their questionable wisdom, decided to fix a debt problem by loading the world up with even more debt. This is like trying to cure a hangover with a bottle of 80-proof whiskey. It might seem to work wonderfully at first, but eventually you are going to die of alcohol poisoning.
Well, here we are 10 years later slumped over in the financial gutter. Another recession is coming soon and I fear we are ill prepared for it. This looming mega-recession will be massively deflationary, spawning a liquidity crisis/dollar shortage of gargantuan proportions. The Fed will react with sheer panic; none of their highly mathematical (but quite useless) models will have predicted the end of the financial world as we know it.
Initially, the Fed will pursue the same flawed policies it did in the previous crisis. They will lower interest rates back down to zero (or possibly even below zero), purchase Treasury and mortgage debt via QE, and hand out interest-free loans like candy (but only to their big bank friends). They will even hand out fistfuls of dollars to foreign central banks via swap lines to help ensure that foreign banks don’t run out money.
However, these radical steps, which were barely enough to stabilize our crumbling financial system last time, will be utterly insufficient this time around. The debt-laden economy will continue to spiral downward, even with all these bailouts in place. In addition, the public is wise to the corrupt bankers’ game this time. The common man will undoubtedly demand a helicopter money bailout of his own.
I’m sure the Federal Reserve Board Members and Washington, D.C. politicians will resist this public groundswell at first. However, I’m equally certain that average citizens will be adamant that they should enjoy a turn at the money spigot this time. If the career politicians and bureaucrats refuse, then I believe we will be looking at another French Revolution: chaotic, bloody and violent.
I think the Powers That Be, fearing for their own safety, will ultimately relent and the helicopters will take flight over Main Street.
Helicopter money for the average citizen could assume several different forms. It could come via something as simple as a lump-sum, one-time check for each adult citizen. Or it could arrive as a rebate of FICA taxes paid over the last 5 or 10 years.
Universal Basic Income, or UBI, is another interesting possibility. This would be a small monthly income stream for life, very similar to Social Security. The only difference is that UBI would be paid to all adult citizens instead of just the elderly.
The final possibility for widespread helicopter money is a proposal by the iconoclast Australian economist Steve Keen. He believes that government should engage in a modern-day debt jubilee of sorts. This would involve the government mailing out big checks to everyone, but with a twist: your debts would be paid off first.
So if you had a mortgage for $100,000 and the bailout amount was $50,000, the government would send the $50k to your bank to pay down your mortgage. In other words, your mortgage would be cut in half. Even the payments would be halved, as it is probable that installment debt would be re-amortized after such an event. The only people who would receive helicopter money directly under Keen’s proposal would be those who had either no, or modest debts.
The primary benefit of the Keen proposal is that it would save our necrotic banking system – something that would appeal tremendously to our corrupt political overlords. This factor alone greatly boosts its chances of implementation.
Regardless of how it is deployed, all of this money printing is going to have a fundamentally different impact on the economy than the prior round did in 2008. Back then, the money was only dropped on Wall Street and it stayed there. This resulted in massive asset price inflation, but little consumer price inflation.
This time around, it is clear that any helicopter money that lands on Main Street will affect prices in the real economy. And this is the crux of my thesis.
From 2008 until 2019 we have been living through a stealth depression for the average person. Wages have been stagnant. Interest income has been nil. Good jobs and promotions have been hard to come by. Instead, all the perks from money printing went straight into the pockets of the large banks and other monopolistic corporations.
This had the effect of depressing the price of hard assets like antiques, gemstones, art and bullion. These asset classes were completely ignored by traditional asset managers who were too busy chasing stock and bond market bubbles to care.
The only exceptions to this rule were the very finest, most internationally-renowned gemstones and artworks, which sold for millions of dollars to the ultra-wealthy as trophies. Any hard asset selling for less than $30,000 or $40,000 wasn’t even considered fit to be an impulse purchase for the obscenely rich. And anything priced below $10,000 was simply irredeemably low-brow.
All of this will change when helicopter money is dropped onto Middle America during the next recession. Average people will rightly start looking for a way to protect their wealth. And neither stocks, nor bonds, nor cash will do the job this time. High-end antiques, precious gems, fine art and bullion will be the obvious safe havens in this scenario.
I don’t care whether you choose to sink your money into a relatively conservative hard asset, like pre-1933 semi-numismatic U.S. gold coins, or opt for something more unconventional, like vintage Must de Cartier wristwatches. But you absolutely must allocate a bare minimum of 5% to 10% (and preferably more) of your investment portfolio to tangible assets if you hope to preserve your purchasing power against the tidal wave of printed money that is coming.
It has been my longstanding prediction that the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet will balloon from its prior peak of $4.5 trillion to an astounding $20 trillion in the next recession. And unlike our last financial crisis, much of this freshly printed helicopter money will find its way into the hands of the middle class. This will naturally drive up both demand and prices for quality tangible assets. But it is vitally important that you act now before the freshly-printed money hits the economy. This will allow you to get into these intriguing unconventional assets for obscenely low prices before the crowd discovers them.
Buy It Now Price: $498 (price as of 2019; item no longer available)
Pros:
-This stunning cushion-cut natural purple spinel gemstone from the legendary gem-fields of Mogok, Burma exhibits a tantalizing, grape Kool-Aid color.
-The gem measures 7.7 mm long by 7.1 mm wide by 5.8 mm deep and tips the scales at a healthy 2.49 carats. This gives the stone a depth to width ratio of 78%, right in the 60% to 80% sweet spot that gives many faceted colored gemstones their optimum brilliance.
-Spinel, a magnesium-aluminum oxide (MgAl2O4), is very similar in chemical composition to ruby and sapphire (Al2O3). Because of this, spinel was often mistaken for its more famous siblings throughout ancient and medieval times.
-While most spinel have gray overtones (due to high iron content) which kill their brilliance, this natural purple spinel is exceptionally lively.
–Spinel is a tremendously underrated gemstone, with exceptional hardness (8.0 on Moh’s hardness scale), density (3.6 gm/cm3) and toughness. It also comes in a shocking variety of dazzling colors, including cherry red, neon blue, bubble-gum pink and, of course, grape-jelly purple.
-This natural purple spinel has been tested by the seller with a rare earth magnet to ensure it isn’t synthetic. Natural spinel will be weakly attracted to a neodymium magnet because of their trace iron content. Synthetic spinel lack iron impurities and will not be attracted to a magnet, no matter how powerful it is.
-One of the best things about spinel is that they are rarely treated, resulting in stones that possess a pure, natural beauty. This is in stark contrast to many other well-known gems, such as emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds. These stones are often subjected to harsh commercial treatments that artificially improve their appearance, including fracture-filling, dying, laser-drilling and high-temperature heat.
-I can understand why some people are reluctant to invest in gemstones; it can be intimidating for beginners. But spinel is one of the easiest entry points into the world of gem investing you’ll ever find. If a spinel looks good and isn’t synthetic, then you are pretty much golden!
-I find purple spinel to be the most undervalued color in the entire spinel family. The delicate lilac and violet hues can be nothing short of jaw-dropping, as in this superb specimen. And yet it is available for a buy-it-now price of only $498 – a laughably cheap $200 per carat. If that price still unsettles you, the seller is open to lower offers!
Cons:
-I could quibble over the fact that the stone is only VVS clarity (very, very small inclusions) instead of being internally flawless, but that is really grasping at straws. Realistically, I have nothing bad to say about this exceptionally beautiful natural purple spinel.
I was browsing Etsy the other day when I chanced upon a marvelous vintage hardwood box from the 1980s. The seller claimed that it was made from rosewood, a beautiful tropical wood that is highly desirable. However, I was skeptical of that attribution. The box simply didn’t look like any rosewood that I had ever encountered before.
Instead, the wood’s tight grain and deep chocolate brown color shimmered with the barest hint of purple. In addition, a thin strip of pale white sapwood splashed across the front edge of the box, creating a striking contrast with the nearly black heartwood.
After hours of research, I finally came to a revelation about the identity of my mystery wood. It was almost certainly African Blackwood, also known by its scientific name, Dalbergia melanoxylon, or locally in Africa as Mpingo.
African Blackwood is an exotic hardwood par excellence. It is not only extremely rare, but also incredibly dark in color – often bordering on completely black. Sometimes specimens are slightly lighter in color. In these instances, the lustrous black grain is subtly streaked with rich browns and traces of violet iridescence. The thin, yellowish-white sapwood is clearly demarcated from the dark heartwood – a visual characteristic that artistically-inclined woodworkers often exploit.
In addition to being stunningly attractive, African Blackwood also possesses amazing physical properties.
Foremost among these unique physical attributes is its incredibly high density. Dalbergia melanoxylon has a specific gravity of 1.27, or 1,270 kg/m3, which is absurdly high for timber. In fact, African Blackwood is the world’s third densest commercially available wood, only surpassed by Itin (aka “super-mesquite”) and Black Ironwood (the name is self-explanatory here). All of these woods will readily sink in water (specific gravity 1.00), which is quite unusual – almost all species of wood float once seasoned.
Although little known outside of woodworking circles, there is a direct relationship between the density of a wood and its hardness. The denser the wood, the harder it is. As a result, African Blackwood possesses legendary hardness. This is measured via the standardized Janka hardness scale, which quantifies the pounds of force necessary to embed a steel sphere measuring 0.444 inches in diameter halfway into a sample of wood.
African Blackwood scores a prodigious 3,670 lbf on the Janka hardness test, which puts supposedly hard woods like white oak (1,360 lbf) and rock maple (1,450 lbf) to shame. Even exotic tropical hardwoods such as Zebrawood (1,830 lbf), Santos Mahogany (2,400 lbf) and Cocobolo (2,960 lbf) can’t compare to the exceptional hardness of Dalbergia melanoxylon.
As a result of its extreme hardness, working with African Blackwood can be quite challenging. If you are lucky, it will blunt your very expensive woodworking tools. If you aren’t lucky, it will snap your favorite carbide drill bit in two like a twig. In fact, experienced woodworkers claim this difficult wood machines almost as if it was a metal.
This is both a blessing and a curse.
It is a curse for obvious reasons. Only the very hardest and toughest blades and bits will make any headway against the recalcitrant wood. And you should count on that hardware wearing at an accelerated rate. Even screws and nails must be religiously pre-drilled to have any hope of penetrating African Blackwood.
But this exotic hardwood’s famed hardness is an asset too, allowing it to hold any design detail marvelously well. African Blackwood can even be machined to hold threads – an attribute that helps make it a wonder-wood for wind instruments (more on that later).
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African Blackwood originates from the arid plains of sub-Saharan Africa, where it grows from Sudan and Ethiopia in the north to South Africa in the south. However, most commercial timber is harvested from two countries: Tanzania and Mozambique.
Dalbergia melanoxylon grows exceedingly slowly due to the harsh conditions of its native habitat. Approximately 60 to 70 years must elapse before a Mpingo tree can seriously be considered for logging. But the very best, darkest-colored wood only comes from much more mature trees that are at least 150 years old.
Despite its longevity, African Blackwood never grows particularly large or tall. Most adult specimens average between 20 and 30 feet (6 and 9 meters) tall, with a diameter that rarely exceeds 1 foot (0.3 meters). Exceptional examples can grow larger than these dimensions, but almost all of these old growth trees were harvested for their wood long ago.
African Blackwood is not an easy timber to wrestle from nature, even after a suitable specimen has been identified for logging. The pith in the center of the trees is often infested by ants, which deposit sand and dirt throughout the trunk. So in addition to being exceptionally hard, the trees are also riddled with silica and other equipment destroying abrasive minerals. As a result, an estimated 90% of the wood is lost as waste in the long and difficult milling process.
One of the most intriguing aspects of African Blackwood is its historical origins. For many thousands of years the glossy black timber has been intimately associated with ebony – that most desirable of dark woods.
This is particularly interesting because today ebony timber is considered to be exclusive to the Diospyros family of trees. This includes Gaboon Ebony (Diospyros crassiflora), Macassar Ebony (Diospyros celebica), Vietnamese Ebony (Diospyros mun) and Ceylon Ebony (Diospyros ebenum). In other words, the Diospyros family contains the “true” ebonies, while all other dark timber species are merely look-alikes.
There is only one potential exception to this iron-clad rule – African Blackwood.
You see, Dalbergia melanoxylon, while technically part of the rosewood genus of trees, is undoubtedly the “original” ebony of the ancient world. It was the lustrous black timber that the ancient Egyptian pharaohs ardently coveted so many thousands of years ago. They went to great lengths to obtain the precious material, which they used in fine furniture. In fact, an intact African Blackwood bed was found in the tomb of that most famous of Egyptian rulers, Tutankhamun.
Trade caravans imported the treasured timber into Egypt from the southern part of the African continent, many hundreds of miles away. It was often accompanied by other luxury goods from the same region, like gold, ivory, slaves and exotic animals. The Egyptians called the prized wood “hbny”, which has become our modern-day ebony – one of the few ancient Egyptian loan-words to be adopted directly into modern English.
African Blackwood is also mentioned in the Bible. The Old Testament book of Ezekiel (27:15) states that: “The men of Rhodes traded with you, and many coastlands were your customers; they paid you with ivory tusks and ebony.” This was purportedly written by the prophet Ezekiel during his exile in Babylon between 593 and 571 BC, proving that Dalbergia melanoxylon was prized throughout the ancient world long before the modern-day ebonies of the Diopyros genus graduated to universal fame.
As an aside, it is obvious that the concept of “ebony and ivory” has been with us from the very dawn of human history. This is no doubt due to the fact that they are both found in the same geographic area – the African savanna. Ebony and ivory were the peanut butter and chocolate of ancient luxury materials. Ivory’s creamy off-white color contrasted beautifully with the glossy darkness of African Blackwood, making the pair a favorite of ancient royalty.
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Today, African Blackwood is used for a number of high-end items, including musical instruments, decorative inlays and turned objects.
Due to its high density and excellent dimensional stability, Dalbergia melanoxylon is a superb tonewood. The world’s very finest clarinets, oboes, flutes, bassoons, piccolos and bagpipes have traditionally been crafted from this rare and unique wood. According to the respected flute-maker Casey Burns, “African Blackwood, which makes an excellent flute, is now the standard by which all other flute tonewoods are judged.”
Even some high-end guitars have been painstakingly hand-crafted from African Blackwood. Unfortunately, due to the tree’s small size it is exceedingly difficult to get material large enough to fabricate complete guitars from. Instead, it is more common for guitar-makers to opportunistically add fingerboards, bridges and other small parts from this superlative acoustic wood. It is a pity that African Blackwood guitars are so difficult to come by, as many experienced musicians and luthiers consider them to be the equal of that tonewood legend, Brazilian Rosewood.
Predictably, instrument grade Mpingo timber – nearly jet black wood from the very oldest trees – is in extraordinarily high demand. Prices can range from $10,000 to $20,000 per cubic meter of instrument grade material, depending on the vagaries of the market. This makes it one of the most expensive woods on the planet.
Because it is an excellent turning wood, costly objects d’art and small carvings are often sculpted from this most desirable of exotic woods. Other items made from Dalbergia melanoxylon include custom knife and gun handles, smoking pipes, fountain pen bodies, duck calls and chess sets. It is also coveted for marquetry and inlay in premium furniture.
Interestingly, African Blackwood is also frequently used as firewood in its native territories. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but Mpingo trees are actually quite widespread across their indigenous range. Furthermore, few trees are large enough to harvest for their timber and the wood is naturally imbued with a high oil content. As a result, Dalbergia melanoxylon is an outstanding firewood species. In fact, it has been said that fires fueled with Mpingo wood burn so hot that cooking utensils sometimes melt in them!
We are currently sitting at a unique historical junction regarding exotic hardwood timber. This is particularly the case when examining supply-demand dynamics for African Blackwood. The founder of Taylor Guitars, Bob Taylor, had this to say about its sister wood, ebony:
“Ebony has been a wood that for two or three or four hundred years we’ve gone into countries and we’ve used the ebony until it’s all gone – literally. Then we move into another country and we take their ebony until it’s all gone.”
Many of the sentiments that Bob Taylor conveys about ebony also apply to African Blackwood, albeit to a lesser extent. While it is in no danger of extinction, commercially viable timber supplies are getting thin on the ground.
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For thousands of years the native African population was so small that any lumber harvesting was inherently sustainable. Then an African population and infrastructure explosion during the 20th century granted us a relatively brief period of abundant exotic hardwood supply. But this short-lived historical anomaly is rapidly coming to an close.
The consequences are predictable. High quality African Blackwood lumber was readily available until the early 2000s. But this abundance was illusory. In reality, the old growth Mpingo trees were being systematically over-harvested in order to feed the insatiable demand for this most compelling of exotic woods.
The inevitable finally occurred on January 2, 2017. That is when the entirety of the Dalbergia genus – including African Blackwood – was added to the CITES treaty (Appendix II) governing international trade in threatened species. I’ve written about this topic previously in an article on Brazilian Rosewood, the most famous member of the Dalbergia family.
As a Cites Appendix II listed species, Dalbergia melanoxylon requires an export permit before it can cross international boundaries for commercial purposes. Happily for professional musicians wanting to perform in a foreign country with an African Blackwood instrument, there is a non-commercial exemption up to 10 kilograms (22 pounds). Additionally, any existing Dalbergia melanoxylon item or raw wood is grandfathered into the system, making it perfectly legal to own, buy or sell – provided it does not cross an international border.
African Blackwood is a unique and desirable wood in a world where few things feel truly original anymore. Its seductively dark color tantalizes with whispers of chocolate and purple – an exotic hardwood without equal. Is it really any surprise that the ebony of the ancients has captivated mankind since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs?
