Maybe gold is the more appropriate color for New York's famous yellow cabs. Two of the city's taxi medallions--the tiny tin plates posted on top of every yellow cab, giving them license to pick up and drop off customers--sold for $1 million each on Wednesday, the first time the price hit the seven-figure mark, The New York Times reports. Consider the tremendous price growth of the right to taxi New Yorkers: over the past three decades the value of a medallion outperformed gold, oil, the average American house, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The first $100,000 medallion was sold in 1985, making headlines in The Times and representing a 900 percent price increase over the past 26 years. At that rate, expect to hail the first $1 billion taxi in 2089.

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