Hello all, I recently paid a visit to my local coin shop, to pck up some supplies and fill some holes in my lincoln wheat cent album. The owner had a tray of junk silver, so I asked to look at it and got into a conversation. He apologized to me for the tray being almost empty. I started wondering to myself when he continued, " just yesterday we sent out a batch to be melted down". Long story short, some places are allowed to melt 90% coins as bullion. This means all of the mintage numbers are messed up, but also, the value of certain dates go up because of supply and demand. So, am I crazy, or is this actually allowed?:rollling: Thanks, scouter35
It's allowed, sadly. There have been some large meltdowns of morgan dollars, someone else will probably know the years. If I had to guess, 1980, or even this past year when silver hit $50.
Wow... It's going to be hard for YN's like me to complete collections if there aren't any coins left to complete them, or at least cheaply
Oh yeah. The Pittman Act of 1918 melted down over half the Morgans from 1904 and earlier. So the original mintages are just a reference. It's important to note the 1921s came after this so none of them could have been involved in that event. Silver coins are always being melted. Apparently it is only copper and nickel that is not allowed to be melted. When silver hits a new high like $100 or more, there will be thousands more heading for the melting pots. Some that may have had too much numismatic value to consider melting before, will be gone.
Sending common date and problem silver coins to be melted is common. This could, over decades cause the values to increase somewhat as populations decrease. However, inflation within the PM market will play a more important role in coin values (rare or not). If you look only at the Morgan dollar and it's total mintage from 1978 to1921, the numbers are in the hundreds of millions. Coin dealers and others who are likely to participate in melting are highly unlikely to send even a problem 1895-O or other damaged low mintage coin to be melted as they can sell these above melt, though discounted deeplyfrom a decent example with the same details. Even if 50,000 1921 Philly morgans were to be melted, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of millions that were originally minted. I'm sure that some "I buy gold and silver" people accidentally have sent a 1916-D Merc to be melted but that is very rare. Most coins that are melted are damged or badly worn common dates that have mintages in the millions for any given date/mm. So, rest assured, you're not crazy and yes it is legal (except for cents and nickels by Federal law).
The reason why some coins are valuable is because lots of them got melted. Lots of dealers or collectors take silver coins to melt. You also have to take into consideration that any coin is going to be less than the mint figure. Coins gets destroyed all the time whether its been melted or destroyed by other means.
because i know silver coins will be melted down, ill only sell them to collectors cuz i know theryll cherish it more and a dealer ill melt it down for an extra buck
Yeah I think most stuff that gets sent in right now to be melted should be. A lot of junk out there. There's some coins you see and you wonder why they're still around. But there's always somebody trying to squeeze some numismatic value out of them. If silver hits 80-$100+ a lot more nicer coins will probably be gone. There's a lot of people sitting on silver dollars out there that got them for 4 or $5 a piece. Others might have hundreds or thousands they only paid $13 a piece for. If all of a sudden these become worth $77 melt value or more, you can imagine they will probably be melted in droves. There's no way to know which dates were affected by the Pittman Act. They grabbed everything that was readily available and began melting them down. No detailed records kept. So no way to know if the lower mintages got hammered or if higher mintage years bore the brunt of it. It's kind of interesting.
You've heard of the "no kill" animal shelters. If I were to open a coin shop it would be a "no melt" policy. However, I would refuse to buy some coins due to being worn so bad you cant read the date or damaged beyond belief. I feel that rare holed or bent coins and problem free coins in lower grades (even in AG or P) have some resale value as long as the date and mm are still readable.
"No kill" animal shelters almost always are sponsored financially, as no public animal shelter can survive financially doing this. Likewise "no melt" brick and mortar coin shops could not survive either unless they were the only shop in a very large population or lack of cash flow would kill them. Until this latest PM boom, the number of coinshops and coin enthusiasts appeared to shrink every year. It is a nice thing to wish, but reality interferes.
When you are the owner of a shop & the common silver isn't moving to the few collectors that may want to pay a preimum & you have to pay the bills or need $ for other collections that would have substancial coin with value talk to me . We will see how quickly anyones opinion about melting things changes. It is a fact & not a bad one.IMO Cheers-
many dealers send in bags of silver coins to be melted. mostly they snd in near slickes up to vg just to get them out of the market. 2 I know told me they are sick of seeing them coming into the shop and there is no real markup/profit in them. BTW the pittman act that melted so many morgans was to back a bunch of new silver backed bills the treasuty was getting ready to issue and is where the silver for the '21 morgans came from and why there are so many. that's the govt.-you figure it out?
Nah! They made millions of some of these. Those that they didn't make millions of, would be nearly impossible to find and those that were found, already have their specific premiums. You'll do fine completeing any reasonable collection. All it takes is perserverance and money. The money will come as you get older and so will the opportunities.
There's something else that messes up the mintage numbers far, far more than the melting of coins does - normal attrition. How many coins do you think are ever just plain lost ? How many just get worn out until they are no longer fit for use ? How many are destroyed or lost in fires, floods, earthquakes and accidents ? A much larger percentage of the mintage numbers are affected by these things than is ever affected by melting !
The original mintage numbers listed in Red Book are a great reference for collectors to use for determining the rares from the commons, if you don't have a good memory, like this old man who is suffering from CRS. But in actuality, no one knows the exact number of 90% silver coins that have been melted over the years, and I think one of the largest suspected meltings of Morgans was in the 60s after the Mint discontinued the release of $1000 bags of Morgans that had been stored for decades in both the Mint vaults but also the Fed vaults. No way of knowing how many Morgans met their fate with the melting pot back then as no one knows exactly how many remained in the vaults when the 60s release was ended.
Unfortunately it's part of the business. We melt coins quite often. Personally we melt 40% halves and war nickels. But the 90% gets sold intact. We also melt bent, holed, and major problem coins of both silver and gold. These coins do not sell in house and the only way to sell them is for metallic content which then gets processed.
The Pitman Act melted the silver dollars to obtain silver to sell to Great Britain for a dollar an oz so they could use it for supporting the currency in India and for buying needed war materials (They needed hard commodities for that, they couldn't buy for paper) Part of the Act did require the government to replace all of the dollars melted down with newly mined US silver (A huge sop to the western mining interests.) I'm not sure why they decided to start the recoining in 1921 instead of some other year such as 1919, 1920, or 1922. I haven't read the whole act. Possibly it contained a timeline. So many months are a cease fire was ratified. Or it may have been the governments way to try and stem the post war recession by pumping more money into the economy.
I understand that the melting is neccesary to keep businesses on their feet, but I always hate to see the destruction of our history.
