GoldFinger1969

Thanks for that post, Roger, if it was in the book I forgot reading it. (1) Amazing that the Europeans could have a "gold standard" but it only applied to bars weighing many pounds. Like having currency no smaller than $100 bills. (2) Any reason why demand for the 1932 Eagles spiked so high ? The Depression was bottoming here (I think the recovery had started earlier in Europe as they debased their currencies) but I am at a loss as to the huge increase in demand and survival for 1932 Indians relative to 1931, 1930, 1929.

How do you like the book, Olympics ? What's the 5th of the "Fab Five" coins you reference ? You don't mean 1933, do you ? I presume the other 4 are 1929, 1930, 1931, and 1932.

If the dealers are cut back...if your friends and others don't show.....and if there are burdensome procedures to access the bourse and see items from dealers....it's going to be self-defeating. Again, it starts with the dealers. If they suffer a critical dropoff -- 20% ? 30% ? 50% ? -- can they put the show on from a financial perspective ? Maybe OCCC has cut their rental prices, I have no idea, but I have to believe if the COST structure is the same as 2020 but enough dealers (and attendees) don't show, it won't work $$$-wise.

I'm strongly leaning to just saving up more $$$ for 2022. Wouldn't be as much fun without seeing all my friends at CT.

Collapsed or ruined economies, devestating wars on their home territory, hyper-inflation, looting of national treasuries -- they are all commonplace in the last 125 years for Europe and most of Central/South America. Not so for the United States.

Interesting thought....I guess the overhead and costs/breakevens for a show like the monthly Parsippany NJ show are small compared to the bigger ones like FUN. I think someone here said that you're out $1,000 with hotel, travel, table fees, etc....before you do 1 single transaction.

There's talk of Long Beach not surviving ? I figured smaller shows and maybe regionals might not make it back...but I thought that The Big Three -- FUN, Long Beach, and ANA/Chicago -- would all make it. I know Central States has lost lots of attendance and dealers over the years. That would be the greater threat IMO for the regionals. Be interesting to see how Bay State and Whitman look in a few years.

We could have a vaccine in a few months. Or an effective treatment.

On the fence now....if lots of folks here and ATS go, I might head down.

These security features on new bullion coins are VERY interesting. Would seem to really raise the bar for counterfeiters -- you just can't make a pico-laser with spare parts. Takes serious $$$$.

x 1,000,000 !!!

Chapter 6....this is a FASCINATING chapter that Roger included; I re-read it this past weekend. It takes a snapshot as of December 31, 1933 to gauge how many of the entire production run of Saint-Gaudens Double Eagles -- just under 70,300,000 -- MAY have survived based on the KNOWN destruction quantities. Obviously, that's a ceiling and doesn't mean that all unaccounted for Saints still exist. But I think it does point to the possibility of more hordes possibly being out there or just large numbers of people holding some coins and being unaware of it. Or even technology-deficient banks or central banks having a few bags in long-forgotten vaults or holding areas. Page 603 gives the breakdown: just under 27,000,000 Saints were melted down, leaving about 43 million potentially available.....subtracting another 3.7 million known survivors and you get just under 40 million Saints missing and/or unaccounted for. The real fun would be if there were any hordes for the 1929-32 years. Even a few hundred or even few dozen could really cause sparks in the market.

People have held it for 2,000 years so they feel comfortable holding it another 20-40 years. It's easily portable and you can get a nice stash of value in a suitcase.

Update Time....Anybody recently purchase and/or read this book ?

I have some IOM silver Saint Michaels coins.

Mainland Chinese want gold bullion or the like, not numismatics with an American flavor. But Hong Kong Chinese and other Asians might be more open to Saints and Liberty's and others that sell at a premium to bullion content.

Interesting, thanks Roger !

Guestimates, I would call them. Gonna check the numbers later in Bowers' book.

Excellent bullet-points, Roger.....my understanding from my economic treatises from 40 years ago was that farmers, small businessmen, frontiersmen -- they all held gold in various forms as a form of savings. Distrust of banks was very high away from the East Coast and big cities. Survival rates of Liberty DE's would imply greater circulation among the masses, no ?

Not sure what you mean by "widely" but IMO if mintages were hundreds of thousands -- or millions -- and you had a few thousand (tens of thousands ?) held by the public (and maybe some banks), that's "widely held" relative to a few hundred with the Saints' final years.

Does anybody recall if the early years of the Liberty DE's (1850-1900 or so) saw the coins be fairly widely held compared to Saints in their final years when you could measure houshold U.S. demand in dozens or hundreds ? Might have gotten a post or two on that from Roger or others pages back in this thread, can't recall.

Back to the OP..... I would have thought that DE's and other gold coins were used more often as a form of "safe savings" and store of value during the pre-Fed (1913) years....when nobody trusted or wanted greenbacks or paper money (even if it was easier to use).....for folks living remotely away from major cities and/or the East Coast (from 1850 onward).....and when Panics and bank runs/failures were more common place. Imagine putting your life savings into a bank and not knowing if it was strongly capitalized or not.....maybe a fraud....or even a legit bank susceptible to a bank run.....Knickerbocker Trust in 1907...etc. It was one thing to live in Manhattan or Brooklyn in the 1870's or 1890's with a bank's headquarters a few blocks away....imagine being on a farm in Kentucky or Ohio and it was 80 miles to the satellite or corporate office. I have to go back and check Roger's works on Saints and check data sources for Liberty DE's.... have to believe usage/holdings for Liberty DE's and early-years of Saints was a big multiple of the demand for Saints in the 1920's and 1930's.

Bingo.....I couldn't put down Roger's book on Saints. Took a long time to get through it, but it was never tedious.

That's the famous letter that got it all started. I believe somewhere else or verbally TR had said he didn't like the Eagle on the reverse of the Liberty Double Eagle because it looked like a "grilled squab."

Comments on Kurt's talk: (1) Hard to believe saying that PM's are risky is the CONTRARIAN viewpoint. Should be the starting point. Saying that PM's aren't risky is as dumb as saying that stocks don't fluctuate. (2) You simply can't even distort the data to prove that PM's are a conservative, "non-risky" investment. Hard to believe someone would. But the PM crowd is not as financially sophisticated as the larger financial markets/stock market crowd who understand things like rolling returns (they key to non-biased performance reviews). (3) I disagree that Bretton Woods was a failure. It worked for a while coming after the wreckage of WW II. No, fixing exchange rates is not a good thing. But at the time, given the speed that information flowed in the 1950's and 1960's, it was good enough. That's not to say that the duration of recessions/recoveries isn't better under free-floating exhcange rates -- it is. But the cost (pain) of an INTERNAL adjustment to economic disloations, recessions, or exogenous events is much higher under fixed exchange rates and/or a gold standard. (4) I think information can be trusted from various sources, even the sell-side and salesmen.....just verify it and cross-check for accuracy. (5) "Insider trading" is very complex. Be careful about distinguishing LEGAL and ILLEGAL material non-public information. (6) I think anybody not smart enough to realize that PM's are risky is going to be lost talking about M2 money supply, NOW accounts, and the other stuff that Kurt and I and other Economics degree folks have studied in-depth. But maybe his crowd was alot smarter ? (7) I wouldn't have focused as much on some of the hucksters and frauds promoting PM's. But that's just me. (8) Great point that Keynesianism works -- but for China and India, where "stuff" is made. VERY prescient point then, more relevant today. (9) Glad you made a great recovery from something as serious as a cerebral hemmorage. Overall, I think the talk was very good, substance-wise . Kurt's speaking style is good, also. For someone like me, it's second nature the topics Kurt talked about: money supply, rates of return, etc. However, I wonder how much of this went over heads of the senior citizen who bought some PMs in the last 10 years and didn't know what he was doing. I would have included more charts and return tables showing how poor coins and/or PM's do over sustained periods. These are SPECULATIONS -- NOT investments !! I would have included some charts that showed how volatile PM's are since the early-1970's....how many people keep chasing the returns of the 1970's and 1980's in PM's and coins/numismatics....rolling returns for PMs, Stocks, Bonds, Cash (pre-1971 and post-1971)....and the general tendency of PM's to overshoot to extremes on both the upside and downside. But overall, a good presentation, Kurt. Have you ever spoke at or considered something for FUN ?