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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Tom Maringer, post: 191357, member: 7033&quot;]I&#039;m no expert on coin prices... but I&#039;ve been in the stamp market for a long time. One of the basic price/demand themes in stamps is that stamps are always worth more the closer to home you get. That means... rare Italian stamps are always worth more in Italy than elsewhere. Stamps are geographically associated and the interest is always greater closer to home. A second theme is... the market for collectibles is always greater if there is a lot of disposable wealth. The market generally does well during good economic times, and poorly during bad. So for instance... now that Norway has a booming economy due to oil exports, early and rare Norwegian stamps are disappearing from the US and going over there, where the market is MUCH higher. The third major influence is demand... as in... how many collectors are there? When I was a kid... everybody I knew collected stamps. A few people were getting into baseball cards... but that was kid stuff... we all knew stamps were the really serious collectible. Nowadays if I go to a meeting of the local stamp club... I&#039;m the young guy! The other folks dragging oxygen tanks get me to carry to cooler of soda. There does not seem to be a younger cadre of collectors to form the basis for future demand. That does not bode well for the hobby, though a few of us might be able to acquire items in the future we could never have hoped to own if the market falls. </p><p><br /></p><p>So where the market for rare stamps will go depends on where you think the economy will go. If China booms, then a lot of people there may get interested in collecting, and the market for Chinese stamps will soar. If the dollar tanks, the market for US stamps is likely to turn sour. If young people somehow get interested in stamps, that will be a good sign. </p><p><br /></p><p>Coins have a bit of the same forces going on, but with the additional twist that they have intrinsic value due to their metal content. I recall that bizarre scene in 1981 when silver shot to $40. At the time we were about to have a baby, uninsured, and trying to figure out how we were going to pay for the hospital bills. Some guys came through town buying silver. I went over with my nearly-filled album of Washington quarters to sell some. I was trying to argue that my rare dates and my high grades should be worth more. The guy was quite blunt and pointed out that he was paying $10 each for quarters and he wasn&#039;t going to bother looking at the dates, they would all be melted... you wanna sell it or not? Well... I sold almost all of the quarters I had holding back only a few key dates... $1,800 worth... just enough to pay for the doctor and hospital bills.&nbsp; As it turned out, a year later I was able to replace all of that for about $180, so the whole thing worked out rather well. But the point of all that is that if the dollar fails and gold/silver becomes more precious as currency, the collector value of rare dates and high grades will fall, leaving metal value as the basis. As long as the US economy and the stock market remain strong, collector coin values should remain strong.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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