There is some talk among the producers of coins from precious metals that a half gram size is needed.

When I first saw this, I had to read it a second time. Half gram? Not half ounce?

There are more than 31 grams in a troy ounce, 31.103 to be precise. A half gram coin would be smaller than 1/60th the size.

The rationale is that a smaller size would be more affordable. To illustrate, if gold were $900 an ounce. A half gram coin would contain roughly $15 in bullion value.
I am rounding. Please, don’t make me use a calculator.

Oh, never mind. I will probably have to get one out to finish making my point.

Is there really a large unmet demand by $15 gold buyer’s? I haven’t noticed.

What I do know is the U.S. gold dollar, which was introduced in 1849 because at the time the United States was swimming in the precious metal bonanza from the California Gold Rush, was never popular because of its small and inconvenient size.

During its lifetime they even made it thinner to increase the diameter to 15mm from 13mm. For comparison, the dime is 17.9mm.

The dollar coin is actually more than three times the size of half a gram. It weighs in at 1.672.

Somehow, I think the world’s coin manufacturers should catch up with the demand for the one-ounce coin first. But then, the premium on the one-ounce coin is far lower than the mark-up would be for half a gram.

After all, what’s an extra $15 or $20 tacked onto a half gram gold coin price. Remember, you are paying for convenience. Yeah, right.

I had a phone call from a Numismatic News reader. She was looking at the weekly Coin Market at a Glance.

“The price of Morgans seeems to be down. Why?”

That’s a pretty broad generalization. I asked her what her point of reference was and I wasn’t trying to be funny. Was it Morgan prices 20 years ago, or from some other year in the past?

No, that wasn’t it.

She was looking at the Coin Market at a Glance from prior weeks.

I stated the obvious. If the prices as printed are lower than those from prior weeks, then indeed prices were lower. If she needed a specific slant on a specific issue, I invited her to e-mail the editor of that section, Harry Miller.

She asked if it had to do with silver?

I asked what date specifically she was looking at.

She replied, the 1921-D. I said it was possible that some of the price fluctuation for that date was due to silver’s moves. It is not a rare coin.

The caller pressed on. Why did the prices fall?

I told her I didn’t know the answer to her question.

She volunteered that she was pricing a friend’s collection and so she was noticing.

It is too bad I couldn’t be more helpful, but one observation I can make is I am getting a large number of calls asking about prices. What this usually means is the family budget is being pinched and some prized coins are going to find their way to eBay or a local coin shop. If enough people are doing this, prices will indeed drop.

One of the tasks I perform on a monthly basis is to make sure that the updates for the Coin Market monthly price guide section in Numismatic News is updated and makes its way through production.

Deadline is this afternoon.

While I was inputting some values for the American Eagle gold, silver and platinum bullion coins, I had the impression that the prices of the silver American Eagles were getting a bit weaker, more so than the swing in the price of bullion would warrant.

Does this mean the Mint is catching up with demand? Could be.

The proof version of the gold American Eagle keeps leaping even as the price of gold itself is lower. The demand is coming from Individual Retirement Account buyers who want to put an authorized gold coin into their accounts.

Now that tax time has just passed, will the proof gold American Eagles retreat a bit?
Again, perhaps.

The other observation I would like to share is the stealth recovery in the price of platinum. It is back over $1,200 a troy ounce after having been significantly below $1,000.

You would think with car sales in the tank that demand for platinum would still be tanking with them, but perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps buyers are looking beyond the present for a recovery.

For a Friday, the thought of an economic recovery is a happy one and something to look forward to – that and meeting the deadline.

If you happen to be near Brockton, Mass., on Saturday and have a little time, you might stop by the main library at 2 p.m.

There is going to be a program presented as part of the upcoming National Coin Week observance

National Coin Week, actually starts, April 19, but , hey, Saturday is Saturday.

Richard Hand, who is organizing the event with the help of three or four friends and two or three library employees, says kids 7 years old and older and adults will be most welcome. The program will last about three hours and some very nice freebies have been rounded up for participants, including a couple of free subscriptions to Numismatic News.

Hand says he has books, a special ANACS slab and other things to give away.

National Coin Week runs April 19-April 25 and other hobby volunteers will be conducting special events and putting on displays all around the country. Check out the activities in your area.

Hand says he will stop by the library every day next week to answer questions and to tend a special exhibit he has put together.

Unfortunately, I am not nearby, so I cannot participate, but if you are, drop by and celebrate National Coin Week with Richard Hand and his volunteers.

The Mint wants to see Americans use dollar coins. I have been helping out in the last couple of weeks. I have been raiding my little stash to more or less get rid of them.

What brought this on was the decision by Krause Publications to change vending machine companies. Those machines in the break rooms here in Iola were virtually my only outlet for dollar coins.

Remove them and you remove the need for me to use them. The new machines were installed at the end of last week. I haven’t yet tried them all, but I was told that one machine did not take dollar coins. Perhaps others don’t, either.

In any event, I spent some of my dollar coins at the Crystal Cafe. I left a few as tips but decided that this is a slow way to get rid of them and the wait staff might mistake them for quarters, especially the Anthony coins that I still have.

So, I paid for a meal with dollar coins last week. The waitress and I got into a good conversation when she asked if I was raiding my coin collection.

I said that I wasn’t.

She told me she has been waitressing for 20 years or so and she has a system of saving the coins she gets as tips. She said she has made many major purchases with the money she saves up in this way from large home appliances to significant home repairs.

So in a roundabout way I was contributing to her next major home improvement. That made me feel better.

Perhaps it is not quite what the Mint has in mind, but it works.

The difficulty in finding the scarce District of Columbia and U.S. Territories quarters have many individuals searching supplies of the denomination in the nation’s banking system and there are interesting observations being made.

Gene Funkhouser of Pensacola, Fla., says that he will no longer accept sealed boxes of plastic wrapped rolls because they are always short $1-$3.

He told me that he first realized something was up about a month ago when he used more quarters as replacements than he thought he should.

He tried five bank companies in his area and even a major retailer and any time the rolls were machine wrapped in plastic the overall total was an undercount. He said occasionally he still finds a roll with an extra coin in it, but that doesn’t affect the overall result.

He wondered why he had never heard of this happening before. I told him I had never heard of this happening, either. The theory of machine wrapping is coins are handled by weight and every roll with an undercount should be offset by a roll with an overcount.

Apprently that is not so in Pensacola. I suppose a statistician could prove that Mr. Funkhouser is just being unlucky for the moment and if he would continue to obtain rolls the quantities would balance out over time, but is that something you would want to bet $1-$3 a box on? He doesn't.

Now it is up to others to see what counts they come up with in their supplies of quarter rolls that are machine wrapped in plastic.

Montana’s two senators want the United States to begin striking bullion coins out of palladium. They introduced legislation in early April calling for a .995 fine one-ounce coin.

No surprise there as Montana has the only working palladium mine in the United States.

The senators' action follows a long line of Western legislative history of supporting mining with metal purchases and turning the metal into coinage.

The Bland-Allison Act of 1878 started the ball rolling, mandating silver purchases and the production of what became the Morgan silver dollar series.

Most Americans probably don’t know what palladium is. I have never seen it even though there have been a few coins made of palladium since Tonga issued the first one in 1967.

Its exotic nature hardly recommends a palladium bullion coin to the investment crowd. When the financial markets became fearful they rushed to embrace what they knew, gold and silver bullion coins. Even platinum, which I assume we are more used to now than we used to be, was abandoned in the bullion coin buying spree of the past year.

The palladium coin proposal is also odd in another way. It wants it to copy the Ultra High Relief Saint-Gaudens gold coin design currently being sold to collectors, right down to the 27mm diameter.

Now making a one-ounce palladium bullion coin just 27mm wide will make it look more like a rubber bathroom sink stopper than a coin.

The question of whether we actually need another bullion coin aside, couldn’t the writers of the bill come up with a more plausible coin? They should have at least had the initiative to raid the Mint’s old coin design cupboard and come up with a Standing Liberty bullion coin or a Mercury bullion coin, or perhaps an 1804 dollar restrike bullion coin.