GoldFinger1969

What was the reason for the Denver Mint ? The Comstock and Cripple Creek finds were winding down or done (nearest supplies)....San Fran's mint was there because it was built shortly after the California gold finds. Why was a 3rd mint needed...and why Denver ? Small denomination coins ?

And where did those coins go once turned into bars ? Same place as Miss Galore and her acrobatic circus.....Fort Knox, Kentucky ! Everything about Fort Knox (but nothing about the electrical system that electrocuted poor Oddjob ) from the illustrious RWB : https://coinweek.com/the-national-gold-bullion-depository-at-fort-henry-knox/

Interesting comments on Saint pricing from John Albanese. It's from late-2022 but I think his Big Picture on Saints is that prices/premiums have/had fallen to the point where you don't need the CAC or CACG endorsement to get VALUE for your purchase if you do your DD: JA: "...I’ve had similar conversations about Saint-Gaudens and how strict we are with MS65 here. But I have to tell you, the MS65 Saint-Gaudens prices have come down so low in price for non-CAC coins that I may disagree with the grade, but I don’t disagree with the value. If that’s their standard, that’s their standard. That’s okay. Interviewer: It’s kind of difficult to get one of those in MS65 these days where Liberty doesn’t look like she lost a knife fight. JA: "Yeah. I remember, I bought some. I bought a nice little grouping of them that were not stickered-nice. They’re relatively nice. They weren’t stickered coins and at the time, 64s were $1,950 and 65s were $2,020. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the prices on the screen. At $2,020, I felt very comfortable buying. I would buy a hundred, I bought half a dozen, but I would buy a hundred at that price, because forget the grade, forget everything else, but the fact with gold at $1,650, looking at these coins, I would pay $2,020. Even if they were out of the holder, I’d pay $2,020. So, I didn’t feel as though anything was askew. Again, not my standard, because to me, MS65 means “Gem”...." So basically he's comfortable with 65's trading at a 20-25% premium to gold.

Sandon, how can you tell that the Barber -- or any coin for that matter -- has FULL luster ? I can see full luster on coins that have it...I can see NO luster...but I have trouble seeing "luster breaks."

I know.....premiums on the $50 re-strikes were about 700% to spot gold when they first came out. I got one about 10 years later for about 10% premium.

Bowers Whitman Red Book on DE's has a good accounting of the SSCA. There were also some documentaries about 23-24 years ago.

But they all, even CAC/CACG, do take it into account via either market or net grading. Maybe not on all coins, but on some.

Not sure if toned is worth as much in the Barber series as it is with MSDs.....I'll go with MS-66.

I know that the coins sold at huge premiums to gold bullion because of all the hype...but is anybody aware at that time the coins were GRADED if the coins were overgraded, undergraded, or pretty much spot-on ? It appears that the bulk of the coins would have been certified BEFORE standards started to loosen about 2003 or 2004 or so. Most of the commentaries I've read seem to imply the coins are properly graded, just a question of how much to pay up for the SSCA hype.

No pics showed up. Would like to see a Double Eagle -- or Eagle -- you say is overgraded.

I can see the value in that, Teddy. Do what you CAN do and enjoy it rather than the drudgery of work. All kinds of shows...small ones, big national ones ?

Maybe Mark or someone who has worked as a grader or knows their operations can answer this question: am I correct that these "grading sets" I am reading about are actual high-quality (and expensive !) actual coins that the graders and the companies use as guides to help in grading ? I read that JA intends to spend "millions" on sets and have his graders look at them weekly. Why would TPGs do this when ultra-high resolution photos can do the same thing at a fraction of the cost ? Why spend millions accumulating all kinds of different coin series, years, and mints.... and also presumably on ultra-rare coins ? Is CACG really going to go out and get a lower-graded -- but still super-expensive -- 1927-D Saint or 1930-S ? Has this been done in the past ?

RWB and others here said that the actual coins owned by celebrity coin collectors like Buddy Epsen and Adolphe Menjou were much smaller than what was sold under their auction name. In other words, their names were used to sell other coins they didn't really own. The power of celebrity. Question: how much is a common year MS-65 MSD or Saint worth ? Now....how much is that same coin worth if it was part of a "collection" owned by Taylor Swift ?

These "influencers" get tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions to follow them. We saw it with baseball cards...NFTs.....meme stocks like GME....now you see it with NVDA. We're gonna see something happen in our sector somewhere down the line.....someone is going to extrapolate a silver or gold move to the move in MSDs or Saints during a previous bubble and say that prices can rise 5-10x based on a doubling or tripling of the underlying metal price. If it happens, someone here ring the bell to SELL......

Do any of you recall threads discussing lost/stolen shipments 10 years ago ? 20 years ago ?

It could be that the nuances of our hobby and coins are so detailed and based on "eye appeal" that no computer will be able to recreate useful coin stuff until we get to Star Trek-level neural net processors. Seriously, I think for me right now this AI thing would mostly be good for translating voice commands into work applications (if it can do that). For instance, I am very slow in the Office365 stuff like Excel (and Word) and if you had an AI voice command where I could TELL it what I want the pages or sheets to look like instead of having to manually do it, that would be something I would pay extra for because I am a beginner/intermediate with those programs and I would expect AI to be at Expert-plus level. OTOH...if AI could somehow crunch hundreds of auction results from books...websites....catalogs...etc...that would be of use to our hobby.

At a minimum....AI can scan hundreds of sources...create a few paragraphs.....have that checked/scanned by an auction house worker for any obvious/gross errors...and now all auctions have a few paragraphs of information that used to take hours or longer to compile. Roger, how long did it take you to come up with that 2-page HA commentary for the 1928 Double Eagle bag and the story of the 500 stolen DEs ? A few hours ? A few days ? Now imagine something getting 90% of that same story and information in a few seconds or minutes !!!

Dubai doesn't have checks-and-balances for private property rights, independent judiciary, transparency, etc. 1 person says no outgoing wires from a Dubai bank, and your $$$ are stuck. Look at what happened with Mark Mobius -- the Indiana Jones of overseas investing -- when he tried to get a few million dollars of his own money out of Mainland China and/or Hong Kong. It took WEEKS if not longer, whereas it would have been 1-2 days here. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/business/mark-mobius-china-capital-controls/index.html

Switzerland's corporate base is largely financial and pharmaceutical, which are usually 2 industries used as cannon fodder by political and economic demagogues. My father worked for a few of the firms, they are falling behind American and European rivals. Spain I would have qualms about. EU and Euro tied down.....Socialist/Communist/Green dominance in domestic policies. Some of those countries have tight immigration policies (legal and illegal ).

Wow, didn't know that. Yes, I think FMTM is probably The Bible on coin operations. Like I said, I'm looking forward to re-reading it from start to finish. Ditto reading the SG DE book. Some of the sections for each coin year/mintmark were of great interest, others less so. The latter tended to be on the die varieties because the information went over my head.

For many years (decades), FedX was the Gold Standard for fast shipping. This is theft from the inside.

Note I said..."plausible"....not proved or even probable. Right now, South/Central America is most likely and the countries most likely are Mexico (oil), Venezuela (oil), Brazil (oil), and Chile (Pinochet) which had the cash and economic prowess to accumulate gold in any quantity. PDVSA is a cash cow which has been decimated by Marxists and Socialists...totally plundered, worse than if John D. Rockefeller had controlled it and tried to screw ordinary Venezuelans. PDVSA produces about 1 MM bl/day of oil. Should be closer to 6 MM/bl. day. They have lost $1 trillion the last decade because of Chavez and Maduro. Unreal.....

Seems like these practices and their disdain for TPGs being neutral arbiters of grade/condition...means they are DECADES behind us in being serious collectors, no ?

Do you have any particular coin series or type that you are interested in ?

Interesting post ATS that caught my attention by someone who said they had family members from Venezuela and employed in their national oil company, PDVSA. He says that the Fairmont Collection/Hoard is from Venezuela...from high-ranking PDVSA and government elites cashing out after Hugo Chavez died. No hard proof offered -- but I see Venezuela as a very plausible source for the Fairmont Hoard: It's a huge hoard, not likely one accumulated by an individual (even a wealthy one). Over 9 tons potentially. More likely to be the kind of stash a small country acquires Venezuela has been an autocratic, kleptocratic country ever since WW II. I could see siphoning off of government funds for personal use by the #1 man and a few of his loyal underlings. PDVSA, the Venezuelan national oil company, has (until recently) been a prodigious cash generator, the kind that could be easily looted by a dictator and his henchman over the decades. Forget about the 1940's and 1950's and later....in Brazil, we had Petrobras looted only 20 years ago and used brazenly by political elites. And Brazil has a somewhat healthy 2-party system; Venezuela hasn't had that in ages, if ever. Central Bank and other banks (if solvent) easily controlled by the government/dictator without any laws on private property rights, an independent judiciary, etc....to protect them. Other hoards -- from a few dozen coins to the 1983 MTB El Salvador Hoard -- trace their origins to countries in South and Central America with similar stories to Venezuela. But except for Mexico, none have a company like PDVSA that generates lots of $$$ and could be easily looted by corrupt government or oil executive higher-ups. Let's see if more develops on this story.