cladking

The markets are rigged and no market is more rigged than silver. So long as the status quo is maintained the bankers can make the silver price dance to their tune. The problem is the status quo is breaking down. It had to happen eventually because the artificially low silver prices and the increasing demand were necessarily going to come to a head in the long run. It's happening now because government is spending money like a drunken sailor who has just shot himself in both knees. We've had severe systemic problems for several years with LTCM and the nickel default on LME being the more obvious symptoms. Since the '87 collapse markets have been choreographed and wholly unpredictable. Now the situation is people want metal and are finding no sellers. This will result in metal being diverted from industry to fill this demand by means of increasing numbers of contracts standing for delivery. This will reduce supply where it counts and cause higher prices. Indeed, with BoA and many shorts all competing with industrial users and the general public to obtain silver there is a buying panic of biblical proportions on the horizon. Sell!!! Just as coins go to the highest bidder so does everything else. Right now the public all the world is the highest bidder and they don't want more paper. If this rattles the bond markets there could be real fireworks.

It should be noted that WC doesn't consider an increase from $2 to $100 "financially meaningful". I suppose he would be right if you had only one such coin.

Possibly. It's not that such a large percentage has been sent in as it is that a large percentage of what's left will never be sent in because they are corroding. The percentage of high grade coins in sets sold from TV shows will be small and many of these will have been degraded from poor storage. There are some hoards of moderns but most of these hoards are a few dozen coins or less so they will not person_having_a_hard_time_understanding_my_point prices like when there are huge hoards. Every time the price of the '82-NMM dimes creeps up a little there is extensive dishoarding and the price down. This won't happen with 1971-D halves. At least not in MS-67. This coin comes remarkably nice so if anyone tried to get a lot of MS-66's I suppose a few hundred isn't out of the question. Every date and mint mark is different. But there are no massive hoards. Nobody had access to enough coins to search and most of the best coins came from mint sets. I've watched the distribution and movements on mint sets for many years. I especially paid attention to buyers and wholesalers.

I believe the 1969 quarter in chBU or better is the most undervalued US coin. By "chBU" I mean a nice attractive, well centered, and well stuck coin with no chicken scratching around the periphery and still lustrous. Marking should be at least as minimal as what the services call MS-63. A typical BU roll of this date would contain no such coin but that doesn't matter because there are no BU rolls anyway. The coins looked like junk and were deemed worthless so they were not saved. Almost all examples come from mint sets but most of the mint sets have been destroyed and the few survivors usually have tarnished quarters. The coin is hardly "rare" by any measure and wholesales for less than $2 each. But people don't have them, nobody has noticed, and the demand could increase explosively. There are many other moderns that are grossly undervalued that could increase at a substantially higher percentage.

Most moderns will never be graded because they'll never be worth the grading fee. You don't grade a '38-D buffalo in F and you don't grade a 1971-D half in MS-60. Pop reports only have validity when the coins actually trade AND trade at prices in excess of about $100. I'd say there are 25,000, 000 collectors in the US. 75% collect moderns but this often includes only states or park quarters and the like. I'd guess a couple million are formally or informally collecting the older clad quarters but most of these folks are younger and are relative neophytes. I'd guess there are about 8,000 serious collectors of Kennedys and 4,000 for old clad quarters. All over the world there are far fewer collectors for moderns EXCEPT for younger and less sophisticated collectors. In places like Guatemala most collect moderns but it's mostly only what's available and moderns in BU tend to be unavailable. I believe that going forward less sophisticated collectors will become increasingly savvy. They'll know what's available and what it takes to acquire it. They will learn the hobby just as my generation learned it; one coin at a time. There are lots of collectors for older coins. Some people can't afford a complete set of XF/ AU bust half dollars but they'll pick one up as a type coin. Most older collectors would know a valuable '71-D half if it bit them on the nose. I've seen dealers glance at rolls of moderns and tell the owner to just "spend them". I've actually found rolls1969 BU quarters in the till at coin shops. I've been looking since 1972 fore a roll of these and they were the only rolls I ever saw!!!

No. The definition stays the same. Most modern coins that aren't degraded or traded principally wholesale are in collections assembled wholesale over many years. Most of the owners of these sets are inactive. and often were never very serious collectors. Paying $9.99 for a tubed set of BU memorials back in the '80's hardly makes one a "collector". Setting aside a few rolls of 1976 bicentennial halves and never looking at them does not define a collector. In the many years at a coin shop I don't recall ever seeing a set of Kennedys come in. I saw some rolls and very few accumulations but no sets either incomplete or complete. I saw lots of silver sets. Hundreds of indians. Where are all these sets you believe exist hiding?

I believe this collapse is caused by two primary factors. One is that prices have increased substantially. It was one thing to buy a 1971 proof set for $2.10 but it's entirely different to pay $32 for a 2021 half a century later. The second factor is probably even more important and that is few people really wanted the sets back in the old days. They were purchased to stay current with collections they weren't even working and because they were the o0nly coins available from the mint. Many people wanted a set but they bought five to flip for a quick profit. Most of these extra sets just languished after they were a couple years old and everyone who wanted one had one. The sets often sold for less than face value so many ended up in cash registers or hauled off to the bank. Millions have been busted up to make date and mint mark sets for the public. But there are very few serious collectors or even active collectors and this is still true. A hundred wheat cent collections walk into the coin shops for every memorial set and memorial sets tend to be haphazard and low grade. Nickel folders and albums end at 1961 or 1965. On the rare occasion a 1965 to date collection appears it will be very typical with very low quality coins for key dates. Indeed, the '82 and '83 issues will usually be a nice shiny AU. There is an active wholesale market for AU coins of these dates but there are no AU's of any other dates available!!! You can buy a roll of nice AU '82-P 5c for as little as $100 but neither love nor money will get you an AU roll of 1981 coins. Most collectors are just taking all these markets for granted because there are those like you telling them everything is "common". 1976 BU quarters are common. AU 1973 quarters are unavailable at virtually any price and this wouldn't change even the price went up many fold. They are all gone just like many other moderns that were never set aside because no one wanted them and everyone assumed they were too common.

Obviously there are very unsophisticated, barely active, inexperienced, or have very minor collections. These collectors might become bigger in the future but I'm talking about active collectors who have spent at least ten or twenty dollars on premiums in the last couple years. Yes, we all have our own niche in the hobby. And that niche changes over time. I actually agree with WC on some points but don't want to confuse the issue by saying what. Besides agreement makes pretty lousy debate. Frankly I think he generally sees the big picture reasonably well but misses all the nuance.

And you said; "Otherwise though, tons of this coinage dated 1933 and later was saved by the roll in (better) UNC grades;.." This is just as untrue as when you said it in this thread on 4-5. Coins between 1933 and 1964 were heavily saved by any measure. The quality of coinage was higher in this era and few collectors even bothered with getting the nicest coin. They were all nice and Gems by the standards of the day were common enough. Modern coinage was not only not saved but most of it is ugly. Part of the reason it wasn't saved is that it was so ugly.

What defines "modern" is nobody saved them. Millions of '50-D nickels were saved but many modern nickels were saved in much smaller numbers. All pre-1965 coins were saved but after this savings were very spotty. Some Jeffersons were saved in much larger numbers than the '50-D and some were very lightly saved. There has been no market for BU rolls so few were saved. This especially applies to the clads.

The "hobby" as you define it encompasses only those who collect "significant" coins and is tiny; even tinier than ANA membership or subscribers to the coin papers. I'm not talking about this. I'm talking about the entire coin business and aggregate buying and selling of coins at a premium world wide. Typical 1964 half dollars have no premium except as silver. There are millions of rolls and many of the buyers have no interest in paying any premium so they end up with rolls of BU '64 halves. They are not part of the coin business per se because they are only buying silver and when something else comes along they'll sell them at market and buy other silver. Most people who know nothing about coins right now and walk into a coin shop or jewelry store to buy silver will not buy eagles or bars because of huge premiums or sell outs. They walk out with things like '64 halfs. This helps dealers but is not part of the coin market. People who buy '64 halves for their collections are part of the coin market. But still the coin market is huge. Bob Vila sells mint sets!. Many estate sales have things like proof sets and buffalo nickels. There are millions of collectors; hundreds of millions of collectors world wide and the number is growing daily. The aggregat demand of these collectors is simply staggering and you think a few thousand slabbed '71-D halves are sufficient for the potential demand!! There is an apparent supply of about 1 3/4 million but many of these don't really exist because they've been spent or otherwise degraded. Kennedys have never been widely collected before like indian cents of bust halves. What do you suppose would be the effect of these coins becoming widely collected? You don't like inexpensive coins but there are hundreds of millions of collectors who can't plop down thousands or even hundreds of dollars for a coin. Even ten or twenty dollars for a bunch of coins can strain their budgets. In light of the simple fact that many coins are already up hundreds fold it seems entirely possible that the roll price of a '71-D half could go $40 or much higher. We ARE going to go from almost no collectors of '71 Kennedys to a much higher level. I don't know how much higher but it will be higher. Your beliefs about value and availability have no bearing on the facts. Your belief that a 1971 half will never be worth more than $1.15 is simply based on your assumptions. I believe your assumptions are based not on trends or the way things are unfolding but on historic norms. And then you seem to forget that historically every dog has its day and even if you think clads are dogs there will come a time (God knows when) that even these mutts will get attention.

1971 half dollars in chBU are common. By your standards exceedingly common. But the chief reason they are common is that very few people collect clad half dollars. If these were tied up in "old collections" there would be a lot fewer rolls and in 50 years these old collections would be walking into coin shop and constitute "supply" for the markets. Since there are currently no old collections the available supply is chBU rolls. You seem to forget that coin collecting isn't only a hobby it is also a business dependent on both supply and demand. Try to remember this when you slam moderns and grossly exaggerate their availability.

You're just clouding the issue. The point is the old silver coins are worth their silver value and the clad despite the lack of demand is wholesaling at more than double face value which is many multiples of their metal value. The silver despite huge demand has no value beyond the composition and the cu/ n brings a large premium. My forecasts of future value are as irrelevant to the current and future price of any coin as yours are. I am merely saying that in the long run coins of similar scarcity and demand will have similar prices. Old classic coins have far far higher premiums than equally scarce moderns and this is a simple fact. Many can be worth 100X as much or much more. I don't have a problem with this but there is only ONE CAUSE of it; moderns have far far less demand. You can invent words to describe or name anything but the fact is many moderns are going up thousands fold not because they are "popular" like most old coins, but because they are very scarce and are getting attention for the very first time. These are all simple facts, and you can't just destroy facts by taking a different perspective or assigning new words to describe them.

It's a wonder it was proposed but may have been crafted primarily to scarce collectors. Enforcement is easy when you have the law on your side. Right now the FED won't allow you to melt your own pennies and nickels with the force of law. They could just as easily force you to dishoard them. Many wouldn't do it but it would drive the markets underground and big players would get charged. They don't need to catch minnows when there are whales and sharks. The effect is the same.

Mebbe I'm just mummifying or am the pretender to the throne. In this country only money talks and the vending machine industry was powerful in 1964 back when you could pump a few coins in a machine and buy just about anything. Now days you'll need a fistful of quarters to buy a candy bar or do a load of laundry so the vending industry is nearly dead. The vending industry insisted that the new coins have the same electronic signature as the silver and the FED was scared of inflation if people perceived the money being debased. cu/ ni clad cu fulfilled both requirements.

Try finding a 1984 cent in MS-65 or better with nice attractive pleasing surfaces. I've looked at thousands including dozens of rolls and have seen "2". Try finding a nice Gem 67 '68 cent. Most have carbon spots. A lot of the zincolns are hard to find nice but come in very very high grade. Some also come so highly PL they are nearly indistinguishable from a proof except for their mint mark. These coins are just evaporating in circulation because they are made of junk metal. Three or four million per day are lost to the ravages of circulation and their remarkable lack of any monetary value.

The mint had no products at all for collectors between about may 1964 and October of 1965. And they had wrecked the products being put into circulation with a date freeze that would give us 1964 coins forever until it was superseded by a new date freeze that would give us 1965 coins forever and no mint marks. They also eliminated proof AND mint sets to discourage collecting but there was a clamor so they invented the hybridized Special Mint Set which almost no one liked. Silver was flying out of circulation and a coin shortage affected all coins but especially silver. Many steps were taken to discourage collectors but most weren't necessary because collectors hated the new coins and the markets had collapsed with the loss of so many collectors and the pall that descended on the entire hobby. Most of these collectors were young so it just sucked the life blood out of the hobby even though more established markets (bust coins) remained relatively unaffected. The price devastation was largely confined to moderns (1934 to 1964) and especially BU rolls and mint sets. There was almost no collecting from circulation between 1964 and 1999. This is the chief route for new collectors to enter the hobby so it languished. By 1995 it looked like the hobby was going the way of stamp collecting. You could buy almost anything except major rarities for a song. This was a dreadful time in the hobby and far worse than even 1965 but it was pulled out by the states quarters. First moderns improved in '96 and then the rest of the market started doing better. These vibrant time now are the result of millions of young people entering the hobby. I expect that over the coming years that many of them will collect the older coins in circulation now. There are no "old collections" of this material so the effects of demand should be most interesting and quite predictable.

We've boiled our differences down to just a couple points. If WC would just quit saying that moderns are common and were set aside in huge numbers we'd have nothing to talk about other than his belief they will forever be ":uncollectible".

Millions of rolls of 1964 silver half dollars were set aside by collectors and the general public. Most of the coins in them still survive with many in pristine condition. You can find BU rolls all day long with no premium to melt. Far fewer 1971 half dollars were produced. The coins were struck to a far lower standard and were far harder to coin because the metal is hard. Most of them looked like garbage and nobody cared about clads anyway. Today there is 100 times more demand for the silver but finding nice attractive rolls of pristine 1971 halfs is an oddity. Despite the lack of demand they wholesale at $23. The hobby hasn't changed that much; people still don't want clad which works out well because there isn't much to be had. '64 Kennedys were common in 1972 and they are still common. Nice rolls of '71 Kennedys were uncommon in 1n 1972 and they are even less common now. At the current time there is only enough demand to support large premiums on the finest couple hundred '71's. What most people don't realize is that by the time you get down to about the 40,000th finest it will look like garbage because there is no depth to the supply. As long as people aren't collecting these the coins in the mint sets are simply corroding away. Low prices do not induce people to store coins properly or to remove them from sets and clean them. WC is certainly right that a coin with a population of 40,000 is unlikely to have a huge premium but there are far scarcer moderns than this. It's also true that collectors might not care if the coin looks nice meaning there are millions and millions of '71 halfs from which to choose. I think collectors do care most of the time.

I don't doubt it but in modern times there aren't many cases where the reverse die wasn't swapped out at the beginning of the year. I'd guess they changed this policy at some point. There are numerous mismatched dies in clad quarters and some could have been caused by this process in 1965 but after this it is at the very least uncommon. There would be dozens of mules and hundreds of thousand, millions of coins. There are just repeated changes to reverses. While most of these changes are very subtle from year to year there are also several quite dramatic changes. Back in the day I could tell the date and mint mark from the reverse with a better than 60% accuracy. Very very few coins stood out as real anomalies.

The mint might not have hated us as much as the federal government but there was certainly animosity. Collectors were blamed for the coin shortage and were being punished with a series of laws and procedural changes. These laws crashed the coin hobby in 1965 and drove millions away from coin collecting. Then the direct fallout of lack of valuable coins or silver in circulation drove millions more from the hobby. There was even a bill (Bible bill) before Congress that would effectively illegalize all coin collecting other than valuable old US coins and foreign coins.

I don't have time now to address everyone's points but; It always comes full circle; you start and stop by saying all moderns are common and were saved in large numbers. Neither statement is true. Even if either were true in point of fact quality tends to be horrendous so high grades would still be elusive. You believe moderns are unimportant and insignificant but you don't speak for every coin buyer. Many people find some or all moderns to be exciting and significant. If I were a young man I'd be buying instead of selling. If my heirs knew how to liquidate them I'd leave the coins for them. It's a far better time to buy than sell. Such is life.

Back in the day if you didn't find these reverses within a few years of issue it was extremely difficult to locate nice examples. Herb Hicks had a few articles published in the coin papers but I missed the most important one since it was before I was a regular subscriber. I wager there will be a few more found over the years. I believe mint personnel were not fastidious about changing the reverse dies at the beginning of the year. If it was in good shape they either chose not to change it or overlooked changing it and there are several pretty big reverse die changes over the years. I found a lot of the ones I had set aside and didn't find anything important but I still have a bunch of undisturbed safety deposit boxes I'm emptying for sale.

Moderns are doing pretty well in several countries including the US. Modern collectors are still rare but they outnumber many of the coins.

You and tens of millions of other collectors stepped out when clads were introduced. The mint and federal government hated coin collectors and did everything possible to discourage it. They didn't really need the date freezes and other contrivances because just debasing the currency was sufficient for most collectors. Millions got out and the ones who didn't had no interest in setting aside rolls of clad coinage. This is one of the things World colonial simply can't grasp. In his defense he believes that if there are more than a few hundred of a coin then it is "insignificant" and will never be collected and there are a lot more of most moderns than this. And to cap off this belief he also believes that varieties and high grade coins don't count even if they are scarce. I take no offence because I probably hated clad as much as anyone. It wasn't just how it wrecked collecting from change "forever" but the metal itself was junk and was supposed to keep the same date forever and not even a mintmark to tell them apart. I suppose it might be a small part of the reason I sold my buffalo nickel collection in 1968 but the principle reason was I needed the cash. I didn't return to collecting until the coins in circulation were starting to get interesting again in 1972 and I had read an article in the paper that said the FED was going to start rotating their coin stocks. Before this it was quite common to get rolls of clad all the way back to 1965 so there was no point in collecting moderns. Now there are hundreds of different issues in circulation (thousands if you count varieties) and most of them are actually tough in high grade because the FED keeps all the coins in circulation all the time and have for half a century next year. But there still aren't large numbers of BU rolls as WC continues to intimate. There are lots of moderns which are probably wholly non-existent in BU rolls because they are very scarce and there are so few rolls.