Silver in Circulation

Silver did get into the $4.50 range back in the early 1990s - I do remember buying bags of Mercs and WL halves at 3.2X.

 

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In the mid to late 70's, finding a silver coin in change became something to talk about but wasn't rare. People would horde coins the same as today, untill they were broke, then roll them up and get face value for them at the most convenient place they could find. Now that the silver and gold buyers have popped up just about everywhere, it became just as easy to cash them in for silver value as it did for face value 10 years earlier. There are so many now that can't even count change, much less know the value of it, that they unwittingly put it back into circulation.

 

Heck, people hoard today's regular circulating coins, then either cash them in all at once or dump the task on their heirs.

It's still not that uncommon for people to cash in hoarded silver for face value, even with spot 14x or higher. If spot dropped to 1x (around $1.30/ozt), doing so would be just common sense (for non-collectors). But there would still be people who would pick it out of circulation, just as there are people who pick nickels or copper cents today.

It's hard for me to imagine the circumstances that would drive silver down to that level, but it's easy for me to imagine that those circumstances (industrial collapse, runaway deflation) would lead a lot of people to cash in whatever change they could muster. That's not something to wish for.

 

That has got to be my least favorite answer. Silver does not regularly circulate anymore. The only reason it is still out there is if someone unknowingly spends silver coins or if there is somehow one that escaped capture for 50+ years. When I say stop circulating I mean you don't see it that often and you would think to yourself, hey there's some silver coinage.

 

Quite a lot of people, easily a majority of the population, were not even alive when silver circulated. So they are not even familiar with it. I have been behind people in line at coin machines and have people get upset because a 1954 dated quarter would not go through the machine - upset until I offered them the going silver value for the quarter that is. Other people just plain throw out silver coins in the trash next to the machine, why do I search those trash cans - because I have found discarded silver dimes.

 

I'd agree - 68 +/- a year was when my sister and I stopped going through our parent's coins looking for 'real' quarters and dimes.

 

By mid 1965 I was seeing less than half the dimes in our till being silver.

 

In 1964, my aunt in New Jersey left two quarters on the kitchen table, and on her way out the door, gave me instructions to pay the paperboy when he came to collect. (50 cents covered one week of the newspaper plus a tip.)

Always checking out coins, I quickly noticed that the quarter with reverse facing up bore the coveted "S", so I immediately picked it up, ignoring the other quarter.

1932-S, I figured it must have been pilfered by a kid from daddy's collection - no way it would have traveled from coast to coast while staying in circulation for 30 years.

So I filled one more hole in my coin album and placed a common date on the table.

 

That's interesting, seeing as how the Mint did not start making clad dimes until early 1966. In fact, the first clad coins, quarters, were not issued until Oct. 1965. I respectfully submit your memory is in error on this one.

 

I agree with many of the posters in that silver coins disappeared quickly once clad made an appearance. At the time I was working at a busy turnpike gas station and would check the change, saving any SLQ's that had a date, knowing they would someday be worth more than a run-of-the-mill coin. Like many posters, money was scarce so saving anything was tough.

 

Silver disappeared from circulation rapidly once the mint switched to clad in the mid 1960s, mainly because people started hoarding silver like crazy. It got so bad that a coin shortage ensued and Congress passed a law that outlawed melting and ordered the removal of mint marks from US coins (hoping that would reduce the number of coins being hoarded by collectors). This explains why the mintage numbers for the mid-1960s were astronomical as the mint furiously attempted to replace the rapidly disappearing silver by operating 24/7. By 1967, clad coins had pretty much replaced all the silver and Congress felt comfortable enough at that point to end the melting ban and allow the restoration of mint marks for the following year (1968).

I was a coin roll hunter as a kid back in the 1970s and silver was almost as rare to find in circulation then as it is now. That's because it almost all disappeared in a year or two after 1965.

 

In December 1966 I found a quarter in my school lunch money that had a D on the back under the eagle. I had never seen that before so I went to the school library and did some reading and learned about mintmarks. I couldn't keep that quarter, but decided to try and keep an eye out for another one. The next quarter I found with a mintmark on the back in change was a 1943 S in 2010.

 

The 1969-d Kennedy Half was the last circulating 40% silver coin the Mint produced for circulation with a mintage of about 130,000,000 coins. The 1970-d Kennedy, with a mintage of 2,150,000 was produced in mint sets, but only a small amount ever circulated (probably by mistake). The 1976-s, with about 11,000,000 minted for collector bi-centennial sets, is also rarely found in circulation. Silver coins still circulate but are seldom encountered...I still find 2-3 coins a year of any denomination from nickels to quarters.

 

There could be reasons why I can't find silver. (with the exception of CRH and Bank.)
1. Only 23% of all silver coins still exist because of the 1980 sliver melt and other times.
2.Everyone hoards or collect them.

 

There are lots of silver coins left. The FED removed them from circulation in '68/'69 and the public got the stragglers.

 

I suspect that at this point nearly all silver has been removed from circulation at least once. We still find silver, though, because people still cash in inherited or stolen coins at the bank, or find them and spend them.

 

I think we reached that point about 1975 except for a few highly isolated instances. No silver can circulate because it is removed almost immediately.

 

I know this highly unlikely scenario was posted almost four years ago, but I've got a potential theory.

Silver is prized as an industrial metal. It has a wonderful characteristic of having the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of all metals.

What if the use of silver in electrical and industrial applications was reduced to virtually zero? How so you ask? The discovery of graphene and stanene are potentially more electrically conductive than silver. If either of these materials proves to be a better conductor than silver, and can be produced economically (this is a far reach right now as graphene is exorbitantly expensive) then the use of silver for industrial use could potentially be reduced to nil.

Now couple the above unlikely occurrence with the discovery of another Comstock like silver load, the demand for silver would plummet. This could potentially drive silver prices to lows last seen in the 1960's.

With possible prices in the single digits again, could this drive hoarders and those inheriting collections to just dump silver at face in pocket change? Who knows? The point is, the discoverers of graphene, Geim and Novoselov already won the Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery. Graphene has so many possible uses that companies worldwide (Apple, IBM, Samsung, Intel, Nokia, Sony) are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into graphene R&D. This material is considered by some to be a life changing wonder material. Who knows what the future holds and its affect on silver going forward.

 

A few years ago, I was browsing in a used bookstore, and I found a bound collection of very old Iron Man comics. In every issue, he saved the day thanks to his super-powered suit, with all its capabilities springing from the magic of... transistors. The transistor was the latest new world-changing toy, and naturally it would enable all sorts of miracles.

Graphene is sort of the same way. It will change the world, but it won't change everything. In particular, even if it can be made more conductive than silver, it still likely won't be as reflective as silver. It certainly won't be as easy to solder or weld to other metals (although I'm sure it will have its own joining/fastening/connecting technologies). It won't have the same chemical properties as silver, and probably won't have the same antimicrobial properties (although who knows what graphene-based materials might do there as well).

I can see silver dropping in price, maybe a lot. But remember that the value of the dollar, and therefore the face value of a quarter, also drops over time. Will silver ever catch up to and pass the dollar on the way down? I kind of doubt it, at least until we reach a Star Trek-style post-scarcity economy.