I was all fired up yesterday for a scheduled hearing before the House Financial Services Committee at which Mint Director Ed Moy presumably was going to reveal Mint thinking on the future of the cent and the nickel. It was canceled.

Virtually every collector knows that it costs more to strike a cent and a nickel than face value. For the nickel, the metallic value is greater than face value, though for the copper-coated zinc cent the metallic value is still less than face value.

Sooner or later, the alloy needs to change if the Mint hopes to stanch the losses on each coin struck.

What the alloy will change to is the question. Canada has a wonderful process to coat steel that could keep the cent looking like the cent and still cost much less to produce.

The nickel could simply switch to stainless steel. It will feel lighter and cheesier than the current nickel, whose alloy is the same as it was when it was introduced in 1866. However, the cost of production will be less than face value.

I know there will be pushback on an alloy change. If the Mint is accused of using lighter and cheesier alloys it can merely point out the obvious that when compared to the euro and other major world currencies, the dollar is 35 percent lighter in value than six years ago and at the rate it is presently falling the world’s savers and investors think it is looking pretty cheesy.

This cost problem has been staring the Mint in the face for several years now, but apparently it takes a special favor by a member of Congress to a small firm in his Ohio home district to get officials to talk about it in public. Or maybe not. The hearing, after all, was canceled.

The congressman, Rep. Zack Space, wants to exempt a firm in his district from a ban on melting U.S. cents and nickels, though this exemption would apply only to pre-1982 copper cents. His proposed bill to do this is suddenly the center of much wrangling.

As special favors go, this doesn’t rank up there with Alaska’s bridge to nowhere, but it is indicative that rules are made to be broken by those with friends in high places.

I was looking at Mint production figures for the Presidential dollar coin program. There have been only three designs so far. A fourth, the Madison, is due out this month.

The program will stretch out over 10 years or so in a manner similar to the state quarter program.

Unfortunately, unlike the state quarter program, the Presidential set is of a denominiation that is not used everyday by everyday people. You can be accused of passing counterfeits in small Illinois towns if you use them.

What happens to mintages in an environment like this? Already, from the Washington coin to the Jefferson dollar, the mintage total has dropped 40 percent, from about 340 million to about 204 million. The Madison will probably fall further as dollar supplies back up.

The Mint has used an artful evasion to not produce Sacagawea dollar coins for circulation this year despite explicit law commanding it to do so. This was done for the good reason that supplies were backing up to unreasonably high levels. The added coins are not needed.

Presidential dollars are going to follow the same path. The only question in my mind is how quickly the mintages plunge. At some time in the next two years, we will reach a point where the only Presidential dollars struck will be a few million for collectors who want them and no more.

This reduces the program essentially to a vanity issue. Collectors get something year by year that nobody else wants just because we are collectors. How long will collectors want something that nobody else cares about? When do we start feeling like chumps?

In other words: who will be saving them when the Gerald Ford issue arrives in 2016?

What’s the Mint selling today? That question goes through my mind most days, especially when precious metals hit new highs.

Word came yesterday that proof and uncirculated platinum American Eagles were back on sale. The “W” uncirculated pieces had been off sale for about a month. The proofs were off sale for a much shorter period of time, though I did not keep track of the duration.

Naturally, prices were raised. The price for the one-ounce platinum proof American Eagle went from $1,599.95 to $1,740.95. That is up 8.8 percent, which doesn’t strike me as a very large number considering the headlines we have been seeing in recent weeks about new record highs. I know those headlines are primarily focused on gold, but people generally lump the metals together. If one is doing well, it is assumed the others are also.

The uncirculated “W” platinum American Eagle ounce went from a $1,489.95 price to $1,630.95, which works out to an increase of 9.5 percent.

The fractional sizes had price increases of similar magnitude.

At this point in time, the uncirculated “W” gold American Eagle coins remain off sale. The proofs are on sale.

Only silver has sailed serenely on. Mark-ups for silver coins are much higher, so the Mint has a wider price cushion for fluctuations. Also, it wasn’t until yesterday that silver recaptured the high ground it had first reached in May 2006. Silver bullion went through the $15 barrier to close at $15.327 a troy ounce.

It is silver’s price that has the greatest impact on the greatest number of collectors. The proof silver American Eagle is priced at $29.95, which is almost double bullion value and the “W” uncirculated is $21.95, leaving a pricing cushion of more than $6. That should carry the coins at least to the end of the year.

What coins will the Mint be selling tomorrow? We’ll have to wait to find out, but holiday gift givers might want to act now and avoid the potential frustration of not being able to buy something at a future date.

Writers for Hollywood movies and television are on strike. I do not know how long it will last. If it goes on for any length of time, it might provide a boost to the numismatic hobby.

After all, many people unwind at night watching television. If there is nothing new to be seen, they might find themselves restlessly looking for something else. Some of them might decide to expand their hobby interests.

Spending a late autumn evening safe and warm at home with Numismatic News, or a handy book on U.S. coins, world coins or paper money can be relaxing and profitable intellectually and financially.

Other people might just go out and shop. Even shopping can be a roundabout positive for the health of the hobby. If enough people go out and spend money, the economy will stay healthy. A healthy economy means that recent trends in the price of gold might just have much further to go.
 
Gold has soared through the $800 mark. It is knocking at the door of a new record. Can it make it to $850 or $875 to equal the highs of 1980?

What if $1,000 is around the corner? Some people think it will happen. It might. Bullion investors might have striking Hollywood writers to thank for some of their profits.

Who would have thought finding nothing on televison could be so stimulating?

Yesterday in the office we had a reminder of how fragile our modern technology and the work systems that are based on them are.

In a community a dozen or so miles west of here a cable was inadvertently cut and our telephone and Internet connections were eliminated.

In one way, it was a delightful afternoon for me after the noontime mishap. I took precisely one phone call. How that got through, I don’t know. I appreciated the quietness. My desk isn’t like a Wall Street trading desk, but some days it seems that way.

The lack of an Internet connection would occasionally intrude on my thoughts when I would think that I should check on this or that, or look something up.

I had plenty to do. There were stories to assign, write and edit. There were photographs to process. There were pages in the gift guide to check. They leave for the printer, electronically of course, later today. My work flow went along.

The ad staff was hit much harder. How do you sell an ad if you cannot talk to an advertiser? How can you e-mail files? Their ability to do anything productive runs down more quickly than mine.

For the Standard Catalog staff, it was even worse. The database is Internet based. They were cut off.

As long as my mind is working, I have work. I can even write a story by candlelight if it comes to that. It is not very efficient, but it can get the job done in a pinch.

If you are reading this, the crisis obviously has passed. The disconnection is a reminder, though, that not everything works perfectly. Only the weather was perfect yesterday. Today it will be as well. Then the cold moves in to remind me that it isn’t so bad working indoors even with an occasional problem of the kind we experienced yesterday.

Many of my readers watch their change. I do, too.

The day before yesterday in the course of my daily routine I received five quarters in my change. I took a look at them. What caught my eye were two of them. One is a 1982-P. The other is a 1983-P. Both of these coins tell a story of what might have been.

Their mintages don’t tell the full story. The 1982-P has a mintage of 500,931,000. The 1983-P has a mintage of 673,535,000. Both are indicative of common coins.

The two coins in my possession definitely are common. The 1982-P is better than the 1983-P. It probably grades AU-50. The 1983-P spent some time in a casino. The edge is nearly smooth as the reeds were worn away in the slot machines and coin counters.

I wouldn’t want to grade it because there are so many hairlines and contact marks that the surface is anything but original or pleasing to look at.

But what if I had saved a roll of each of these back when they were new issues? The Coin Market price guide says the uncirculated 1983-P roll of 40 is $1,500, or $37.50 for each coin. The 1982-P is $220, or $5.50 each. Neither price is a bad return on investment. Imagine what an MS-65, -66 or -67 could bring.

Why are they so valuable? The reason is that the U.S. Mint did not produce uncirculated coin sets,  popularly called mint sets, in either year and hobby habit from the 1960s of saving roll or bag quantities of coins had pretty much died out.

The result is that anyone trying to put an uncirculated quarter set together has to work a bit to find examples of 1982-P and 1983-P quarters.

I don’t think the collectors of those years believed that today’s prices could be possible with such high mintages, but then that scepticism is what kept me and millions of others from saving them in any quantity. In the end, that’s what makes a coin valuable.

If you still have the Numismatic News subscription premium from those years, which were uncirculated sets that we assembled privately, take a look at those quarters. You might want to get them out of your junk drawer.