The release of 2021 halves into circulation, and the mix of dollar coins I recently got from my bank, prompt me to ask the question. My last four rolls of dollars had: 20 circulation SBAs 22 proof Sacajaweas 58 circulation Sacajawea and Presidents When I started getting some proof dollars, I thought little Jimmy broke open his father's proof sets and spent them on candy. But now I wonder, what happens to unsold proof sets? How did all these proof coins wind up in circulation rolls? What would have happened to unsold rolls and bags of those Kennedys if they weren't released to circulation? Paul
A couple years back when the Apollo coins came out, I bought heavy. Not because I was looking to profit or anything, it was one of the events that played heavy in my childhood..... But the rest of that year I received a number of emails from the mint begging me to purchase more of them. Told me that they struck more than they anticipated selling. I too wondered what became of the unsold pieces at the end of the year.
They may just put the proofs out though I am not aware of it. They're probably grading rejects from a bulk submission. Anything less than a 70 for ultra modern proofs basically isnt worth the effort to sell on the vast majority of issues and dealers will just spend them or deposit them to get something for it.
if precious metals, or clad or base metal coins, USUALLY, they offload surplus to their bulk program dealers on a bidding basis. dealer bids how man sets they will take and price they will offer, starting bid is above cost, highest bids get filled first on down to nothing. it normally would cost the mint to scrap the products and melt down whatever is surplus. https://www.coinworld.com/news/prec...inage-to-select-dealers-in-sealed-bid-auction a dealer might buy the silver proof sets for the silver, and dump the dollar nickel and cent at FV into circulation. they might buy dozens of sets, and break them down, same goes for Home Shopping, but in hundreds, but only interested in the silver coins in the silver proof set not the clad. they are going to get for around melt in some cases, the other coins are just an extra $1.06 per set they got for silver melt from people. And yeah, if you buy a proof set and a silver proof set, you got doubles of the cent, nickel and dollar coin.
I don't believe the mint does anything with overproduction of its coins. They ship all to Federal Reserve banks and those are the ones that "hold" onto coins for long periods. Because the coins have monetary value, they are sold off or if precious metal, melted down. I remember reading articles of "found" bags of coins in bank vaults, which were being sold at a profit by dealers.
With precious metal coins, whatever the mint can't sell, (and they are required by law to make a profit when they sell), they are requited by law to melt down. The selling by auction, they could easily still be making a profit, just not as much as usual. Now if they've changed law, regarding the profit clause, and to my knowledge they have not, then they could take a loss. But either way you can find it all in the US Code.
I don't think that it has changed any. In 2010 there was over a billion golden dollars in treasury vaults. We are now 12 years later.
Yeah but those aren't precious metal coins and their not collector coins either, they were minted for use in circulation. And there's an entirely different set of laws and rules for circulation coins. And they don't sell those, they only distribute them to the banks if and when the banks ask for them. And, they are not monetized until they are released to the banks. So officially, (technically), they're not even money yet.
I read the numbers on these and they are definitely money makers for the mint. But how long sitting in storage facilities, monitored by guards, the overhead etc. is it before they are no longer worth it to keep? Melting them seems the better idea to me, and how much would that cost to separate the metals?
If you take (approximate numbers) $.20 cents of metals and melt them and go through the coining process and turn them into $1.00 coins, the mint shows a profit of $.80. They can’t afford to melt them because that would show a loss.
The mint doesn't get to pick and choose what they do and when they do it. Everything the mint does is dictated by laws, and they have to follow the law. That's why they minted all the dollar coins to begin with - because the law at the time said they had to. But when none of the banks would place orders for the dollar coins and they just kept on piling up in the vaults, the law was changed and that allowed them to stop minting them. That's just it, the only way they get a profit at all is when the coins are monetized by being released to the banks. Until the coins are released, there is no profit. The same thing goes for all coins struck for circulation. They can only melt them down if and when the law allows them to do so. But if they were melted down, then yeah they would have to take that as a loss. Think about all the GSA coins, all those coins were minted for use in circulation. But because the banks wouldn't place orders for them, they sat in the vaults for decades. And they sat there because the mint wasn't allowed by law to melt them down. And it was only when Congress passed a law allowing the mint to sell them to the public that they were allowed to do that.
