When Will Today's Common Coins Be Valuable?

Why would the Chinese be interested in American Clad coins?

 

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Some very low mintage coins over 100 years old haven;t gone up all that much in value considering. I mean a 16D Mercury is only worth say $30,000 with a mintage of 264,000. And back in those days, there were fewer people keeping uncirculated coins.

Today coins are produced by the TRILLIONS and a lot of people save MS coins. So there will always be an ample supply of modern coins. 30 years, 100 years from now, there are going to be tens of thousands of each modern coin saved in an MS state, Maybe even hundreds of thousands, considering there are about 2 million numismatists in the US. Modern coins, unless they are of an extremely scarce variety, are never going to be worth a lot. Even MS70 proof coins are in much greater number than ever before. Simply because of better handling techniques used by the mint and collectors. IMHO, anyway.

Gary

 

Yes, but China has a population of 1.3 billion.

Chris

 

First off coins are not produced in the trillions. It's only been in recent years that the combined total of all coins ever made on the face of the planet exceeded one trillion for the first time. It probably happened back around 2005 or so.

More importantly is that it doesn't matter how many coins are produced, only how many are saved. In 1916 there were thousands of collectors in the country who collected moderns and would have set aside a '16-D dime. Many would set aside extras since it was a very low mintage. Of course 10c was real money in those days and the low mintage might cramp someone's hoarding style if he couldn't find a nice shiny roll but the fact is people collected these coins.

This is not so true of most of the moderns. A quarter was a lot of money in 1969 but there weren't thousands of collectors. There were almost no collectors and the few around were not paying any attention to quality. Neither was the mint. '69 quarters look like junk, none were saved, and many of the few mint sets surviving have corroded coins in them now. There aren't lots of old clad collections that are going to be coming on the market in the future because there are almost no clad collectors. For every clad quarter collection that surfaces in the next few decades there will be dozens of mercury dime collections because people collect mercury dimes, not clads.

It's certainly not that all the moderns are rare. Far from it. Most of the moderns simply exist in far smaller numbers than is assumed and the small supplies can not stand up to any significant demand. The prices aren't cheap because the coins are junk. They aren't cheap because they are common. They are cheap for a single reason only and that is that there is almost no demand. When the demand materializes you'll see far higher prrices and that is a fact.

There's no certainty that the demand will ever show up but this is probably the ONLY period in history that collectors have ignored modern coins. If (when) there is a return to the mean then watch the prices go crazy.

All over the world collectors are discovering that no one saved any of the modern coins and prices are soaring. The ONLY difference in the US is that there is still no demand. I'd be surprised if this situation can persist a lot longer. It is an aberration. It's not natural for collectors to be appalled by collectibles.

 

The only circulation-quality modern coins that will significantly increase in value within the next 30 years are Franklin Halves, older Kennedy Halves, and Ike Dollars

 

How'd you pick those series?

 

Maybe. But what makes coins expensive is DEMAND, not supply.