Interesting Article on the Cutoff of Modern and Classic US Coinage

And, what sparks young collectors' (the future of coin collecting) interests are what they find interesting in circulation - state & park quarters, 2009 bicentenial cents, and, to a lesser degree, president & NA dollars.

 

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Yes. I agree, for the main part.

My understanding is that a lot of younger collectors are also collecting modern world coins all the way back to include the 20th century. Some of the increases in prices here are just staggering though I believe most of the demand is coming from the country of issue. This is unusal for so many young collectors to branch out into foreign and might be the result of the lack of encouragement they get from we old-timers.

But, there's no question that there will be more of this branching out into other areas as time goes by and I have to believe it will include all or most US classics. Younger collecors don't collect the same as older collectors and probably won't collect old US coins the same way either. It will be interesting to watch how this all developes over time. There's a lot of change coming and it will affect everything when it comes to coins. There are going to be a lot of winners as well as some losers.

Because there are so many collectors who will be collecting in twenty years it's entirely possible that the number of winners will just swamp the number of losers. This demand will not only come from young collectors in the US but a spectrum of new collectors world wide as well as millions of states quarter collectors coming back to the hobby as young adults. They will be exciting times and everything will be in flux for a long time now.

 

This is something people are missing.

When they wwere children most of these collectors couldn't afford things like Gems and the WI varieties. When they come back they can afford them. This is the same thing that happened to the US market when millions of baby boomers returned to collecting sparked by the states coins. But they weren't looking for states coins so much as 1909-S VDB cents and the coins they couldn't have in 1965 when the market collapsed. Now only 20 years later there will be millions of returnees and a lot will be looking for states coins.

People have been ignoring these looming changes for a very long time. In ten years the geriatrics will be mostly gone from the shows and it will be mostly younger people.

 

There's nothing wrong with the definition except it doesn't explain why there are a hundred 1938-1964 dead Jefferson nickel collectors to every 1965 to 2003 Jefferson nickel collectors. It's not like Jefferson is more or less dead or that he more or less represents LIBERTY. It doesn't explain why Lincolns were more heavily saved after 1933 and then less heavily saved after 1965.

To collectors concerned primarily with design your definition is great but to other collectors it omits a great deal of information and change.

 

I like your thoughts on certain things. Like your defense of moderns and how some priviliged few ruin things for others. However you lost me on the ham boiling going down the sink. What's up with that??

 

Bravo

 

That's fine, but keep in mind that's your opinion. Most folks find things from their youthful days to be better. There is some sort of nostalgic tie to the past. That is why you see old men buying classic cars. Same thing with coins. You remember seeing Mercury dimes and Buffalo nickels in circulation as a boy and that has some nostalgic significance for you. Some day the Lincoln cent will be redesigned or discontinued. The little boy today will be the one collecting those Lincolns in the future (and probably typing on CoinTalk how those "were real coins" ).

 

Shoot, I'd opt for something with a stick shift. You younger folks know how to drive something 'standard'?

 

I think you weren't reading closely . I was born in 1971 so other than some games with the quarters and changing cents from bronze to zinc, the crap the mint makes today is the same crap as the day I was born and I don't like it. Yes, it's my opinion. The difference is I'm not trying to convince you I'm right. I'm just saying that nothing you say will convince me I'm wrong.

 

That makes sense. I wasn't trying to convince you either. Just saying that today's coins are not crap to everyone. I am in agreement with you however that I rather collect older coins. For one thing they contain valuable metals. Has the mint done things in a gimmicky fashion to boost sales over the last 25 years? Sure they have. With that said some people still like to collect modern coins. Like you said... who's to say they are wrong.

 

Ham is being pumped full of water. The exact technique I don't know but I suspect they are spending huge amounts of money to build vacuum chambers. They are filled with hams and flooded with a water and sodium tripolyphosphate solution. When air pressure is returned the ham sucks up all the chemical and water and the sodium salt keeps the water from coming back out. This can more than double the weight of the ham which doubles the sale price and triples the cost. The world is poorer and the consumer is poorer but the company gets a huge windfall. They also use sodium nitrite in ham which is a deadly poison in even small quantities. This is to preserve the color and they use so little that people survive. Neither of these chemicals have ever been tested on man. There is no legitimate use of sodium tripolyphosphate to my knowledge. It is not a preservative or curative but is only used to add water weight.

I opened a ham a couple months back that I bought at Aldis (Cooks) and it sprayed water for several seconds. It was so "salty" that I could eat it in only small portions. Even after the pressure is released lots of water remains in the meat so it can't be cooked covered or it boils in that water instead of baking. Everytime I try to thaw something in my frig it leaks all over because plastic bags are flimsier now and everything is soaking wet so red colored water leaks everywhere. You spend extra money at every step and you lose half the cost of the product if it's half water. Chicken and fish are the worst but most people won't complain. They package things like scissors in plastic that requires a sledge hammer to get into. Across the board most products are getting worse with ever less concern for the customer. Yet people still buy the stocks of these companies and the CEO's get bigger and bigger bonuses and pay. We're wasting more resources than we use now days.

Millions of machines were made to call people at home and bother them so even laws against it won't stop it. Now lots of money has been spent to increase the weight of things sold by the pound so we'll have wet products for a long time.

I just can't think of anything more representative of the age of greed than zinc cents. How better to remember this era than nice Gem zincolns? They should never have been made at all and quality is so abysmal it's a wonder any exist in Gem. But in reality most are fairly common in Gem and can be picked up for almost nothing. Only six or eight dates are really challenging and these are cheap as well since there is no demand.

 

Right of course. I know. And I really don't have any problem with Reynolds's conclusions - I just don't think his tables of market values are a good way of supporting them, since plenty of coins that Reynolds can't stand also have high market values. But looking again at his article - he wants to validate his opinions on an absolute financial basis, and so he's dismissive of people who date the classic era according to historical events (the withdrawal of gold coinage) or sentimental factors (date ranges in old coin albums). Well, what's coin collecting if you suck all the history and nostalgia out of it? Just a weird and seriously ill-considered investment strategy, if you ask me.

When I read cladking's forthright defense of moderns, it makes me feel like collecting more moderns. When I read Reynolds - it makes me feel like collecting more moderns.

 

Cladking I want to first off thank you for pushing modern coins. By buying them you remove money that would be my competition for buying historic coins. I'll buy coins that start with 18 all day long and you are making it cheaper for me to get the coins I like.

However I think like many the problem with moderns are that they survive in large numbers at high grade. Look at the populations in the pcgs reports. You will see that the percentage of all graded coins at 70 to be large. At even 5% of all coins to grade at 70 means when you do simple math like multiply that percent of 70's to total mintage you find your condition rarity not so rare. Want to argue that only better coins are submitted? No problem the percent times mintage gives you such a large number that you can make tons of adjustments down in expected 70's and still overwhelm the market with these gem coins because of mintage and survival.

But don't let me slow you down. This is America. Buy whatever you want. But when you talk about turning off new collectors just think how psyched up people will be when their modern graded coins value crashes and burns. I'm not saying to avoid collecting moderns. They are quite beautiful given modern minting techniques I'm just saying don't pay a huge premium for slabbed moderns buy them raw and enjoy them in your collection.

 

At some point all the coins were "modern." I collect what I can afford, and in my opinion buying an 1896 S Barber Quarter in AG4 would be worth more in say 50 years than the 2012 ASE 2 coin Proof set in PR 70. So which is it, condition or rarity? I'd say the answer is both. I have heard others gauge modern VS classic based on the year they were born.

 

That's basically inline with the thinking (folklore) that it's easy to get gem coins from mint sets because all mint set coins are nearly perfect. COMPLETELY FALSE!

It may take another 100 years for collectors to realize it but most of the high grade modern pieces have been lost to attrition, circulation damage and improper storage.

 

By that definition, even though you have no interest in them yet specify a particular year, you're saying that a 1953 Washington, which looks like a 1968 Washington, is a classic coin?

 

I don't know about classic vs. modern, but the article sure reflects my collection. I have almost entirely high mint state red cents back to about the mid-thirties, but very few before that. Same trend with nickels, dimes, quarters and halfs. Oddly though, that only applies to US coins. That cut-off point does not seem to apply as much to foreign stuff. I also do German coins, and find that the break point is the beginning of the German Empire. For Canadians, it's King George, and US Philippines comes about ten years after the mainstream US breakpoint. If I had to pick cut-off points for US classic vs modern, it would Indian Head/Lincoln for cents, Buffalo/Jefferson for nickels, Mercury/Roosevelt for dimes, Standing Liberty/Washington for quarters, and Walking Liberty/Franklin for halfs. Note that the cut-off points span about 40 years, so my criteria have little to do with mintages, survival or metal composition and more often coincide with major design changes for each denomination. In this sense, I tend to align with 19Lyds - allegory vs hero worship

 

That's a good point but why is that?

Better yet, why is this subject matter continues to come up?

To me it is very simple: Give me Liberty or Give me whatever other dead president you can convince congress to immortalize.

 

I think you’re mixing apples & oranges, mixing modern business strikes with modern mint products. Since most modern business strikes have extremely high mintages, there may or may not be many high grades down the road, depends on how many are saved. As for rare modern mint products, like the 5oz Silver AtB’s, which will be rare in any grade due to their low, low mintages, the only reason it matters if it grades less than MS69, is you don’t want to be holding an inferior grade, since most of them are graded MS69 or higher. On the surface, any analysis that discounts absolute (mintage) rarity and only looks at grade rarity is flawed.

 

I'm not sure it really works this way.

A lot of people figure that moderns siphon off dollars that would otherwise go to classics but there are several facts that argue against this belief very strongly. The most obvious one is that some modern collectors wouldn't buy any coins at all if there weren't moderns.

But the really big reasons are that a rising tide lifts all the boats. In other words successes in moderns are often expressedas successes in classics. People use money they make in the markets and buy all sorts of coins. In the long run collectors almost always branch out but this even happens in the short term.

When dealers sell coin tubes or scrap silver it doesn't matter whether it's related to BU moderns or XF indians. It doesn't matter if they profit on modern silver or large cents; the profit goes to stock the coins that actually sell. This is mostly classics now days and it's dealer demand even more than collector demand that sets prices in the short term.



To me a 1969 quarter is no less historic than a 1909 cent. The quarter might have sat in Neil Armstrong's locker at Cape Canaveral as he took his journey to the moon. It's pretty unlikely the '09 cent did or that it was used to buy the roll-on deodorant that became the prototype for the mouse we use on our computers.

I like old coins as much as the next guy and have collected most of them at one time or another. It wouldn't bother me if everyone collected them and it often seems they do.