Five ounce Silver Bullion Coins -- Here they Come! (but read the caution first)

Tomorrow, April 28 at noon is when the mint will be selling the first of their America the Beautiful Five ounce silver bullion coin, depicting Hot Springs in Arkansas. The price will be a whopping $279.95 per coin with a household limit of one.  With silver approaching $50 an ounce, the markup is unexpectedly modest.  

The mint expects its computer to be overwhelmed, and a quick sellout is anticipated.

The hype reminds me of another series that is fizzling out.  I speak, of course of the first spouse gold coin series.  The first issues sold out quickly.  Then the price of gold (and the prices of the subsequent issues) rose dramatically.  Suddenly, there were few who could afford to collect the series.  

sound familiar?  At current prices, those who want to collect the oversized quarters will be paying $1400 per year for the five quarters that are issued annually. The entire series will have 56 coins.  That means it will cost nearly $16,000 for a complete set.  I predict that interest will be lost before the series expires.

The mint will dramatically increase its production for subsequent years, thus guaranteeing that the 2010 set will be the rarest and most valuable.

I wish you the best of luck battling the mint's computers for the right to purchase one.

The war against the paper dollar continues

The General Accountability (GAO) office has released a new statement on how much money  the nation would save if we exclusively used dollar coins and terminated the paper dollar.  At first the savings seem staggering: The GAO announced that we would save 5.5 billion dollars over the next thirty years.

I'm sure this is old hat to most of you, but we've had a dollar coin (on and off) since 1794).  Sadly, dollar coins  have never been popular with Americans.  As a numismatist, I hate to admit it, but Americans love paper.  I have documented this on my cynical history of the US dollar.

The big deception is the quoted savings is over a period of 30 years.  The savings is, therefore 180 million dollars per year.  With a population of approximately 300 million people, this means that each US citizen will save approximately 60 cents per year if we make the paper dollar bill defunct.  Compared to other government expenditures, this savings is negligible.  Sorry, GAO, I'm not buying your argument.

Silver Certificates -- not valid for silver -- how about for tea?

Silver certificates contain the statement :"This certifies that there is on deposit in the treasury of the United States of America one dollar in silver payable to the bearer on demand."  The statement represents a broken promise from the United States government. I have a stack of silver certificates.  The U.S. government stopped redeeming them for silver in 1964.  There is no expiration date on the bill.  Our government promised us silver and did not deliver.

I gave a well-worn silver certificate to my daughter, Rachel Planchet.  At school, she became thirsty, and went to a drink machine to attempt to purchase a bottle of peach tea.  The machine refused to accept her silver certificate.

Two generations of Planchets have now been thwarted by certificates that we could redeem for neither silver nor tea.