For most of a century, there was an asset in New York City that never went down.
Not in the Depression. Not in the seventies fiscal crisis. Not on Black Monday. Not in the dot com crash. Not in 2008, when almost everything else fell apart.
A taxi medallion. A small metal plate bolted to the hood of a yellow cab.
Gif by jamrocktaxi on Giphy
In the 1940s one cost a few hundred dollars. By 2013 a New York medallion was trading for over a million dollars.
Read that again. A piece of metal, worth more than a house in most of America.
Banks lent against them eagerly. Brokers marketed them as retirement plans. Immigrant drivers were told, correctly for seventy years, that this was the safest thing a working man could buy.
Then it fell roughly ninety percent in about four years.
People lost everything. Some lost more than everything, because they had borrowed against a million dollar valuation for an asset that stopped being worth two hundred thousand.