Ah, the good ol days, when I could take 50 cents to the nearest gas station or market place and load up on tons of candy. Now it's a dollar just to get the "smaller" Snickers, they didn't have the double or supersize Snickers back in the day.
In a forthcoming peer-reviewed paper “Pricing Relationships of United States Type Coinage”, in The American Journal of Numismatics Second Series, vol. 23, 257 – 263 (2011), you will see that, on average, the price of type coins were relatively flat from 1987 to 2002, then nearly doubled by 2009 and have stayed flat (±25%) since then (most likely due to the economy). My gut feeling is that now is the time to invest in problem free older numismatically important coins rather than trying to flip profits by investing in bullion. This assumes that you are in collecting for the long haul. You can translate numismatically important as the key coins an just about any given series of US coins, rather than high grade common dates.
Good thoughts sir. My only two changes would be I would think they are flat due to a lot of activity happening in bullion. When bullion changes dramatically, old coins get sold to raise funds, and many are drawn to bullion instead. As for "numismatically important" I would say more scarcer series, (18th and 19th century) etc more so than simply keys. I find many keys nowadays at nosebleed prices versus their real rarity. Remember keys are only keys if people are pursuing the entire "set", something that with slabbing I am seeing a decline of.
And the minimum wage was a dollar an hour. Today a lot of entry level people even at places like McDonalds are getting $10 an hour, and you can still get a fair amount of candy for half an hours wages.
I couldn't disagree more. Oh sure, this is the golden age of collecting that young people today will look back upon fondly and wistfully and saying things like "if I had only known". But your perception of the market is wrong and your prediction for the future is likely to be very far off the mark. Coin collecting is in no danger of going the way of the buggy whip but demographics and the changing collector base are about to wholly upset the status quo permanently. This won't be like 1995 when many people thought coin collecting was a dying hobby because the number of participants is going to continue to increase but the diversity is going to explode. It will no longer just be middle class American white men most all of whomare baby boomers. Coin collecting will be far broader base and include more countries, more women, more children, and more economic classes. The tastes of these collectors is impossible to predict but it's very very safe to think it will be more countries, more modern, and much more diverse. Classic American coins aren't going to go away or reenter circulation but the number of collectors will plummet as the wealth of the remaining collectors soar. This will certainly put extreme pressure on the prices of widely available coins. They will likely dip to below their 1995 lows. This won't impact most real collectors very greatly unless they are unlucky but it will wipe out most of the investment money in old coins. It's the same old cycle; things go up and down and very few things go up and down more than collectibles. This time it will seem that a lot of these coins will never come back but they most probably will. Moderns will be where the demand has the most impact on supply no matter what people in the future choose to collect. This is because the supply of most moderns is tiny as well as is the demand (and price). Any change in demand will create large pressures on price. Any change in price will have almost no effect on demand. This is a prescription for explosive growth. This is being seen in other countries first because there is so little demand for moderns in the US. It's going to be a wild ride for at least the next couple decades. The coin collecting hobby will look very very different then than it does now. I envy young folks who get to ride this thing but they'll think I had even more fun than they did. It's been a hoot but I'd trade them if I could.
