Well it seems as our American empire is falling apart. Roman empire died the same way with overextended military, debased currency,tons of debt with no way our,a society torn apart and turning in on itself. So what is my point/question? Well I have a rather decent collection of morgan dollars. All slabbed with pretty nice grades. So my question is has the coin collecting market hit it's apex? My collection is an investment and in 25 years will the collecting aspect in a nation so messed up lose alot of its value? Now do I keep the collection,sell and replace with gold or silver bullion? Bitcoin, residential property,stocks? Just looking for your own thoughts on things,no flaming or blaming.
I don't look at my collection as an investment because I know the return would be little to me being in the hole. My collection is for fun and enjoyment period. I collect Ikes and inexpensive Morgans because right now I have to be stingy for a few years.
I have actually flipped lots of coins for a profit and I know most of coins I own I can get close to or more than I paid. It's more along the lines of in 25 year what will coin market look like. I know it's hard to say , but our country is teetering on a meltdown with so many directions it could take.
I think the market will go back up. Right now, I think there is just an over saturation with all of the new introductions from all over the world that have been coming out every year, This is just my opinion though, based on what I have been seeing.
There are indeed many interesting echoes and parallels between US history and that of the Roman Empire. Don't read too much into them, however. Could history repeat itself? Sure, in a few limited ways, maybe. But never in an exact replay. And sure, all great civilizations decline and fall, but more often they just evolve into something else. Remember, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (and earlier, that of the preceding Roman Republic) took centuries to play out. And it basically survived for nearly another thousand years after that, in a slightly different form (the Byzantine Empire). And while these are uncertain times of social strife and division and economic insecurity, don't forget that we have survived the recent Great Recession and went through worse social unrest during the Nixon/Vietnam era; never mind the World Wars and Great Depression and Civil War before that. America will survive and at least some future Americans will thrive. Does that mean there won't be calamities and wars and changes in government and society? Of course it doesn't. Change is inevitable. Some of that change will be difficult; even catastrophic for some groups and places. Other groups and places will be largely unaffected. My advice? Live in the present, enjoy traveling into the past with your coins, and take the future as it comes; a day at a time, without getting overly worried about other people's predictions of doom and gloom. Worry about doomsday when it arrives. Until then, live, collect, and be merry. If you want to stockpile bullion or whatever, do it. More power to you. There are ways of combining bullion-stacking with collecting that can be fun. But have fun, and don't worry about the sky falling. Until it does. That's my philosophy, anyway.
A quick point about the Roman Empire and debasement of the coinage. I know a lot of modern financial gurus like to sound important by saying that Rome fell when it debased its currency. Although that was not your question, you seemed to have embrased that view, which I assume you read somewhere online from some website trying to scare you into buying gold/silver. Let me just say this...the people writing those articles are morons with no knowledge of numismatic history. Did Rome debase its currency? Sure! A quick glance at a denarius of the 1st Century AD and a double denarius from the mid-second Century AD will confirm that. This coin from the 1st Century is around 95% silver And this coin from the mid-2nd century is only 45% silver, weighs almost as much as the 1st Century coin above, yet it is supposed to be double the value of the coin above. Well, surely the Empire collapsed then, right? So the articles in those "Buy Precious Metals" websites would have you believe. Well, wrong! In fact, things got much worse for Roman coinage. Here is a double denarius only 2 decades after the coin above. Basically a chunk of bronze with hardly any silver, and sloppy quality control. So is that when the Empire fell? Nope, in fact when that coin was minted the Empire was beginning to recover from the so called "Crisis of the 3rd Century" and things were actually starting to look a bit better despite the debased currency. And what those idiot websites won't tell you is that during the supposed demise of the Empire, things were doing so much better that silver coinage came back. Just look at these 4rth Century coins. But towards the late 4rth Century silver coinage disappeared again, so collapse, right? Nope, not for another 3 generations in the West...and they were still minting gold coins till the end. But wait, how could it have collapsed with gold coinage? Surely the idiot "expert" who wrote the article said Rome would not have collapsed with precious metals as money....except that the reality is gold coins couldn't fix the systemic issues, better organized barbarian states, and bureaucratic failures those precious metals shills gloss over or are too ignorant to understand. And guess what? The eastern half of the Empire survived another 1000 years mainly on bronze coinage and the occasional severely devalued silver...and they did quite well for a long time despite that. Heck, the ancient Chinese conquered a massive Empire and lasted more than two thousand years as a great imperial powerhouse. And it was a highly advanced society despite the fact that they did it all with a monetary system based almost exclusively on bronze, copper, iron, and lead coinage. How do the morons writing those articles explain that? Oh, that's right, they don't because they don't know what they are talking about, they just want to sell you their gold by peddling pseudo-numismatics history based on facts they pulled out of their rear ends. If you want to learn about Rome's collapse and draw parallels to the US, start by actually reading a book on the collapse of Rome written by a proper historian. You'll then come to the realization that any parallels between the Roman collapse and the eventual decline of the US are purely incidental and done by glossing over 1000 other facts to make something seem to fit what the US may be facing today. You just can't compare the world 1,700 years ago and the world today that neatly, because the world back then was vastly different from the world today. People might have been genetically almost identical to humans today, but that's about where the similarities end. The ancient Romans had no notion of what we would call today a nation. Modern nation states didn't come around until the 1600s. Read up on the Treaty of Westphalia. The Romans would have also been clueless about nongovernmental organizations, wouldn't know the first thing about international bodies such as the UN, and much less about transcontinental alliances like we have today (such as NATO), had no clue about global banking structures (even your local community bank would have seemed quite foreign to them), and I'd doubt they'd understand much about the different schools of thought in international relations that govern global diplomacy today. And if you want to learn actual history about ancient numismatics, and not something someone who's never even held an ancient coin is trying to tell you, get an ancient numismatics book and read up about ancient coins and ancient economies, and also come check us out at https://www.cointalk.com/forums/ancients/ . Us ancients folks might be able to teach you a few things about ancient coins that doesn't come from the wild imagination of someone peddling bullion coins to you.
