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 Friday, September 19, 2008
Are you ready for a new half dime?
Posted by Dave
I have been a collector for 45 years. Many coins have appealed to me as I learned of them, but never in my wildest dreams did I ever say to myself, “Gee, I would like to have been able to spend half dimes.” Well, I may get the chance anyway. Rep. Frank Lucas, a coin collector in Congress who represents the 3rd district of Oklahoma, has just introduced legislation that he calls the “5 cent restoration act,” which calls for a clad half dime based on the size and shape of the coin that was abolished in 1873. The half dime was 15.5mm in diameter as compared to the 17.9mm of the dime. The weight, of course, is lighter also. If the legislation is passed, it would take effect Dec. 31, 2009, which I guess means starting with 2010, though I suppose it could include a special collector-only 2009 issue. I have to wait until Monday to find out what Rep. Lucas is thinking. I have an interview scheduled. The idea might be the most clever way of breaking the current impasse over the future of the nickel or the silliest thing anyone ever heard of. I hope to find out which it is and air the congressman’s comments on next week’s Coin Chat Radio at http://www.coinchatradio.com.
9/19/2008 8:48:35 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) 
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Thursday, September 18, 2008
Gold echos the past
Posted by Dave
Watching gold yesterday was almost as explosive as the annual 4th of July fireworks display I watched in Bonduel this year. No one, of course, got hurt in the fireworks display. I am not so sure about the volatile gold market. Gold went up like a skyrocket and it lit up the bullion investment sky. By the close of regular trading in New York yesterday, the metal had set a record as the largest one-day price gain in terms of dollars, up $70.10. In percentage terms a day like this has not been seen since 1999, which you may remember was the lead-up to the Y2K problem that was going to happen to our computers when their internal clocks were to be thrown off when the year 2000 arrived. Silver had a good day, too, rising by $1.178 to close at $11.64. This was the biggest one-day gain since 1979. It is these references to the 1979-1980 boom that make me nervous. I remember what happened when the euphoria faded. Gold went up from $742 on Jan. 16, 1980, to $803 on Jan. 17, 1980, up $61. This was on its way to its closing high of $825 on Jan. 21. On Jan. 22, it dropped by $155 to close at $670. Manic upward movement was followed by manic downward movement in less than a week. I cannot claim to know the future, but volatility works both ways. Even if the long-term uptrend in gold has further to run as many experts expect, short-term corrections can be wild. That is the time when there is a big difference between being a long-term gold owner and a newcomer chasing headlines. Be careful.
9/18/2008 9:04:27 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Listen to David Hall
Posted by Dave
David Hall is a special guest on Coin Chat Radio tomorrow. He is a man who needs no introduction among collectors. As founder of Professional Coin Grading Service, the first privately operated coin grading and authentication service, he revolutionized numismatics in the 1980s. The PCGS idea to encapsulate graded coins took the hobby by storm and created its own verb: to slab, meaning to grade, authenticate and put a coin in a capsule. The interview is not about his past however. He is president of Collectors Universe and the firm has upgraded the PCGS Web site to include a weekly video commentary by David about market conditions. There is much more. It has been my experience that David Hall says interesting things. The current interview meets that description and more. The program is available online tomorrow morning at 11 o’clock. It will repeat every hour for the following week, and it can be downloaded onto an iPod. Visit http://www.coinchatradio.comYou might also want to take a look at http://www.pcgs.com/prices/
9/17/2008 8:53:30 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Give a boost to show attendance
Posted by Dave
The Kansas Numismatic Association has come up with a good idea to spur attendance at its annual show June 12-14, 2009, at the Cessna Activity Center in Wichita. It will offer a gasoline rebate to members of its member clubs who drive to the event with at least two other fellow club members. The rebate amount is $50, which even with $4 gas can still cover the cost of bringing people into the show from quite a distance. Anyone receiving the rebate will also be expected to volunteer for two hours at the show, helping out with setting up, cleaning up, greeting visitors, or whatever else needs to be done. This is a clever way of keeping attendance up in uncertain times to make bourse dealers happy and for finding the necessary help to keep the show running smoothly. Cliff Mishler brought this to my attention yesterday at lunch at the Crystal Cafe. The Kansas Numismatic Association Newsletter had just arrived and he had photocopied the relevant pages out of the current issue beforehand. Other clubs might have other ideas to tackle the same problem. Let’s share them.
9/16/2008 8:56:18 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Monday, September 15, 2008
Don't get carried away
Posted by Dave
Sometimes it pays simply to wait as events unfold. The news this morning is that Lehman Brothers, a large Wall Street investment bank, is filing for bankruptcy. Gold is up a bit on the news. The dollar is down a bit. The stock market is expected to get hammered. What will happen in the coin market? There are a lot of cross currents. If the economy continues to slide into recession, collectors who have lost their jobs or who are fearful of losing their jobs likely would cut back. Sounds logical. The paradox is that a golden age of coin collecting was during the Great Depression when unemployment reached a high of 25 percent of the work force. People gravitated toward it because it was a cheap form of entertainment and they viewed putting coins in die-punched pieces of cardboard as a means of saving money, with the added element of lottery thrown in if they found one of the scarcer dates. Today seems to be one of those days where for most of us in the numismatic hobby it simply pays to stand back and wait. Why jump to conclusions? I have been a collector for 45 years. I don’t intend to quit. I imagine most collectors feel the same way.
9/15/2008 9:09:07 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Friday, September 12, 2008
Time for Coin of the Year
Posted by Dave
The Coin of the Year nominating panel met yesterday afternoon here in Iola, Wis., to create the list of choices for an international panel of judges to vote on in the first round balloting in this two-round process. It is an intense effort because mints submit large packets of information. Those of us on the panel are grateful for these, but it does take a while to review everything in them. Coin of the Year is sponsored by Numismatic News sister paper World Coin News and the NumisMaster Web site. When the trophies are presented in February 2009, it will be the 25th anniversary year for the award. Time sure flies The world coin market and the mints that supply it have changed a great deal in that span of years. Coins are much more reflective of consumer choices than they ever used to be. The bulk of the designs produced that so impress those of us who judge never see use in ordinary commerce. That is both a shame and a wonderful development. It is a shame because average citizens of the world are hardly aware of what coins are being produced. It is wonderful because coins that don’t need to circulate open up new opportunities for mints to be creative. The results range from rectangular coins to those that are colorized or have holograms. Watch this space for new information in the coming days. The People’s Choice Award will again be selected by voters online.
9/12/2008 9:03:28 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Thursday, September 11, 2008
What shoe will drop next?
Posted by Dave
Today is day umpty-seven where collectors cannot buy the proof and uncirculated collector versions of the platinum American Eagles with the “W” mintmarks. Collectors are probably not complaining too loudly because the price of the precious metal has been in free-fall. It is down more than 50 percent from the highs earlier this year and by about a third since the Eagles went off sale. I see this morning that platinum is at $1,144 a troy ounce. Falling car sales are taking a large bite out of platinum sales. The downturn in these sales has even hit China. The Mint though is probably wondering if its cumbersome pricing mechanism which by law requires publication in the Federal Register among other things is just too slow in meeting market fluctuations. Whatever inventory of coins the Mint had on hand when sales were suspended is now very much in the red as far as Mint costs go. I hope they had some form of hedge in place to mitigate this. It is certainly difficult for staff to have certain Eagle coins that they cannot sell for pricing reasons and in other areas, like one-ounce gold and silver bullion Eagles where they cannot keep up with demand. What happens if buyers of physical American Eagle coins get discouraged with the metals market price declines and high markups and simply stop buying, or sharply reduce buying? That would be the final shoe to drop.
9/11/2008 8:59:10 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Wednesday, September 10, 2008
New numbers for dollars
Posted by dave
Andrew Jackson Presidential dollar production figures have been released by the U.S. Mint, so it is time to update a topic I visited only last week. I noted Sept. 4 that Presidential dollar production was heading ever downwards. Well, that trend has been broken. The Jackson figures total roughly 7 million more than the prior John Quincy Adams numbers, 122 million versus 115 million. Does this mean the American public is somehow reacting differently to dollar coins this time out compared to the prior two times? Take a look. Production during the first two years of the Anthony dollar in 1979 and 1980 totaled 848 million pieces. The third year saw production fall to collector pieces only. During the first two years of the Sacagawea dollar, 1.419 billion coins were struck and in the third year production fell to collector pieces only. This is the second year of production of Presidential dollars and the combined total so far is 1.302 billion. If the Martin Van Buren total approximates the Jackson total, the two-year total will be virtually tied with the Sacagawea output. What will that mean for the third year? I wrote last week that the trend was ominous. I had an e-mail to point out that the second year total of Presidential dollars is a higher percentage of the total that the two other second-year totals. That’s true. Second-year Anthony production equaled 10.6 percent of the two-year total. Second-year Sac production was 9.4 percent of the total. Second-year Presidential dollar production could come in around 34 percent of the two-year total. The question is whether this redistribution of production means anything relating to the future success of the Presidential dollars compared to the prior two dollar coin issues. In is hard to see any likelihood of the American people warming to the idea of using dollar coins simply based on this data.
9/10/2008 9:48:02 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Could you find me?
Posted by dave
If you were looking for me yesterday and did not find me, sorry about that. The www.numismaticnews.net Web site has been redesigned and a last minute problem kept the blogs from being posted until late in the afternoon. Because the URL has changed, if you have bookmarked my blog, do it again. The bookmark to the old Web address itself should still work and propel you to the new site, but this is not true with the blogs. Go to the new site and click on the Community box at the top of the page. Then click on the “expert blogs” that appears to the left. The menu of blogs then will appear for to make your choice. Or if you are just looking for me. Here is the link.
http://blog.numismaticnews.net/buzz/
9/9/2008 8:59:34 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Monday, September 08, 2008
Lost check, lost opportunity
Posted by Dave
There is as joke somewhere about people who cannot take yes for an answer. I had a phone call on Friday afternnon from someone who was clearly frustrated with us and I clearly was not laughing by the end of the conversation. Fundamentally, it boiled down to a check that seems to either have been delayed in the mail or lost. I can understand how this would prey on the mind of the affected person, but in this case it seems to have shut out every other aspect of the problem. He wanted a subscription extended to World Coin News, but it had not been because of the check problem. He wanted to be able to talk to our accounting department in Cincinnati to see if it had been deposited yet. That was one thing I could not give him. Our accounting department does not talk directly with the public. He had been asked to send another check by the person handling subscription calls. I told him he could do that and we would refund the money from the other check if it showed up. He said his impression from the other phone conversation was it would somehow be docked by a certain amount in the process. I said if it was a full refund he wanted I could make sure he got it. He dropped that topic and went back to asking to talk to accounting. He talked about free issues he had been promised because of some late delivery experiences. I said if it was free issues he wanted, I could see to it that he received some. He dropped that topic and began to complain about a subscription renewal offer to Numismatic News. I told him I did not handle subscription renewal offers, but I thought they were pretty much the same for all magazines. He had mentioned that he hoped to subscribe at some point to Bank Note Reporter. I suggested he send the second check and if the first one showed up, the money could be applied to Bank Note Reporter. He changed the subject again and went back to asking about talking to accounting. I said I couldn’t do that. There was much more to the call, but you get the idea. I understand the caller’s frustration. A lost check is a pain. However, there usually is more than one way to solve a problem and I feel that I failed in making that point and bringing the conversation to a successful conclusion.
9/8/2008 4:59:03 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Friday, September 05, 2008
Final campaign lap starts
Posted by Dave
Both major political parties have selected their standard bearers. Barack Obama and Joe Biden represent the Democrats. John McCain and Sarah Palin represent the Republicans. Today we are sending out a newsletter where we ask the recipients if it will make any difference to the hobby which presidential candidate wins in November. Columnist David Ganz reports that though both candidates have supported numismatic legislation from time to time, neither one seems to have any significant record one way or the other on hobby-related matters. Naturally collectors pay attention to who will become the Treasury secretary because it is his facsimile signature on American Federal Reserve Notes. There will be a new Treasurer of the United States as well, who signs to the left of the Treasury secretary. Both will change no matter who wins and that virtually guarantees a new Series date of 2009 for notes. A new Mint director is in the cards. The position is one of the political plums that are handed out to a supporter of whoever is President rather than a party loyalist, so even if the political party does not change at the head of government in November, the person in the chair likely will. All of these changes are interesting to those of us down at the collecting level, but there are other more important questions. Will we get more new coins or fewer? Will the value of the dollar go up or down on foreign exchange markets? How will that affect gold and other precious metals? I am sure you can think of others and will be paying attention to the campaign over the next two months.
9/5/2008 9:00:45 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Thursday, September 04, 2008
Dollar mintages not encouraging
Posted by Dave
I am in a statistical frame of mind this week. Yesterday it was state quarters. Today I have the mintage figures for the Presidential dollars before me. Collectors believe you need to abolish the paper $1 bill to get anybody to use dollar coins. Until then, old habits and loyalties dominate usage patterns. These old habits dictate a death spiral for the Presidential dollar, though the Mint has just launched a four-city effort to avert this. Will it be enough? Well on the one hand, the statistics do not yet show that rigor mortis has set in for the Presidential dollar. Mintage numbers are still significant but they do point straight down. Each succeeding design has a lower mintage than the one before it. Washington sits with a 340,360,000 combined total from Denver and Philadelphia. Adams follows with 224,560,000. Thomas Jefferson sits at 203,610,000 and Madison is at 172,340,000. That makes the 2007 first-year total approximately 941 million. This year the Monroe dollar total is 124,490,000 while the John Quincy Adams is 115,260,000. If the pattern holds, Andrew Jackson will be lower still. That decline will suit American Indian tribes who are complaining that Jackson should not even be honored at all because of his policies toward Native Americans. There will be a few more Presidents against which this issue can be raised as a reason not to use the coins. Other than the paid optimism of those executing Mint strategy, it is hard to see success at the end of this effort.
9/4/2008 9:02:34 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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