Smuggling Fluff: How Beanie Babies Became Contraband

Everybody loves to recall the Beanie Baby craze in the late 1990s. It's the perfect reference point for bubbles like Pokemon cards and NFTs, and they're a good story about monopolistic competition. But these stories rarely remind us of the massive smuggling problem that created situations like this:

The restrictions come at a time when Beanie Baby smuggl…