Quick primer on the economics of Persian rugs: the best ones are handmade with very high thread count using fine silk and wool. The people who make them had to undergo years of apprenticeship under supervision of a master. To make one rug takes a team of artisans months to weave, and they don't get paid very much. The only reason you can buy these rugs at a "reasonable" price is because of political conditions in Iran - they are desperately poor, many of the children have no future, and they have to do this to survive. Some of them escape from Iran and start audio forums like this one
Remember that Iran is sitting on huge reserves of oil, and the only reason they are poor is because of international sanctions and their pariah state status. Look at where they are on the map, how much arable land they have, and you realize they have a lot of georgraphic advantages. All it takes is a change of government, the lifting of sanctions, and the prosperity of Iran will improve immediately. They will reclaim their traditional status as a Middle Eastern superpower.
What this means for the rug business is that all these weavers will have something better to do. The available pool of weavers will go down just as wages go up. That will cause the price of new rugs to shoot through the roof through a combination of scarcity and increased production costs. To meet demand, more new rugs will be produced by weaving machines (and before you ask, you can easily tell the difference in quality between a hand weaved rug and a machine weaved rug). This means that hand made rugs will become scarce, and whatever you own will increase in value.
Make no mistake, a well maintained hand made Persian rug is an
investment. If you think they are expensive now, wait till you see what happens if there is a change of government in Iran. All this is understood by collectors of fine Persian rugs. You could say that anybody who buys a fine Persian rug is effectively exploiting underprivileged Iranian workers, but that is the reality of the current situation. They won't be underprivileged forever, and when that happens you
definitely won't be able to afford a Persian rug.
Sadly, I am not one of those "collectors". I own a couple of pieces of average value rugs, but I would really love to own a masterpiece. It would cost less than my audio system, yet be worth more by the time I die. The rug in my listening room is not Persian, it is a thick wool rug of a modern design. The reason I use it is because (1) it is affordable, (2) it works as room treatment, and (3) to buy a Persian rug that size would be stonkingly expensive.
(To the moderators, I am NOT being political. I am only discussing the economics of Persian rugs!)
