Just wanted to share these coins I picked up several weeks ago. I paid $20 a piece for these. Has anyone else come across any of these? Does anyone know how much silver these contain?
They are 90% silver and contain .7234 oz. of actual silver. They are not rare, but circulated coins generally sell for a modest premium over their silver value, and are a nice way to buy a big old silver coin from the days when coins had real intrinsic value. Basically a rough equivalent of our Morgan dollar.
They were Belgium's large silver coin issue as part of the Latin Monetary Union. It was started by France in 1865 when they saw the British Pound Sterling taking over as the world reserve currency. You see a lot of these based on the French 5 franc. They all weigh 25 grams with a purity of 0.900. The 2, 1, 1/2 & 1/5 denominations from each country weighed the same in each country, but were only 0.835 fine silver. The gold pieces, like the French Rooster 20 franc is the same in all of the countries that either joined, or made coins to trade within the Union. Venezuela, Colombia, Italy, the Vatican, France, Greece and many more countries were all members. It is the original European Union. There is a good write up in Wikipedia about it. Just google, LATIN MONETARY UNION. Fun group to collect, and not much above spot.
