The UK antiques market crashed around 1990. Recent downturns due to a multitude of reasons are relative rounding errors.

There was a time when antiques went for crazy money and you did envy people who had got phenomenally rich during the craze that predated that huge crash. Antique dealers had their 'stock' at home and they lived a charmed existence going off to auction houses, getting better rates at the bank, fiddling taxes, learning about history, living in houses full of things you could not touch, driving big Volvo estate cars and not having to work 9 to 5.

It all went wrong because it was a speculative bubble and the wheeler-dealer antique dealers ended up the bag holders, with all of the debt and nobody wanting to buy from them. On the surface it appeared as if it had been a classic market of arbitrage, this was before the Internet and before TV shows (Antiques Road Show, Lovejoy) that popularised what the antique dealers had been doing.

But then when it crashed it became a bit more obvious what had really been going on, the antique dealers had been buying and selling amongst themselves, the price going up each time with no genuine customers buying this stuff. So the grand house of the antique dealer with all of that priceless stuff you dared not to touch really was useless cruft.

The letter writing bureau scoffed at in the article had some utility, during peak antiques hype such a bureau wouldn't have someone writing letters at it, it might have the land-line phone on it and keep private papers inside, but it wouldn't be strictly useless, it would be valuable 'stock'. There were antiques that were vastly more useless than a writing bureau, with no utility whatsoever.

Pricing was also special information, only a reputable antiques dealer could tell you the true price of something unless it went up to London to go to auction. Local auctions in places like Tetbury (Gloucestershire, famous for antiques) were only attended by people in the trade, if you did go there as a layperson then you just wouldn't understand it, plus laypeople had proper day jobs that precluded such shenanigans.

The tax scam aspect was because the antiques really were unlicensed securities, you could have an antiques dealer buy that letter writing bureau and fiddle the VAT on the purchase in a multitude of ways. Plus interest rates were significant then so you only got rates beyond what normal people had access to if you borrowed a whole lot of money on a business rather than person basis. This was where the regular money was being made, this masked the bag-holding eventuality of the trade back then.

The TV shows came along to glamorise the game and the TV shows came along to give everything a price. Obviously there was eBay, changing demographics, changing travel patterns, the death of the High Street, straightforward fashion, IKEA, AirBnB and everything else. This may have wiped out the scraps that were left after the big crash of the early 1990's, but really the original game and the lifestyle that went with it was something quite gravity defying, driven by greed. Everyone so busy being greedy that the antique dealers didn't realise until too late that they were only trading amongst themselves and that they were to be the ultimate bag holders.