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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;bkm, post: 447607, member: 16045&quot;]First of all, I want to admit that I haven&#039;t put much thought into this yet.&nbsp; I&#039;ve only recently began to consider bullion or numismatic coins.&nbsp; I see some merit to each, and some drawbacks as well, but my thoughts on them are immature -- everybody starts somewhere.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>I do realize that many people are expecting silver to shoot for the moon at any moment, but the dollar is strong right now not only in comparison to other fiat currencies, but also the PM&#039;s.&nbsp; There is deflationary pressure (in the Keynsian sense) and virtually all the commodities are depressed from artificially high bubble values of the last few quarters.&nbsp; I do realize that the central banks are pulling out all the stops to reinflate asset prices, and the chances of those monetary policies spilling the effects of excess money supply into the prices of everything else (inflation).</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>If I were a speculator, I would be better off with shares of a silver ETF like SLV -- at least in the short term until the whole market were put at risk of insolvency.&nbsp; The fees to speculate on metal this way are far lower than in bullion.&nbsp; But frankly the cost of preparing to &quot;survive&quot; the &quot;big one&quot; is high compared to its imminent probability.&nbsp; You could say I am speculating -- I&#039;m betting that the world economy is going to survive and we&#039;ll see a depression in PM&#039;s that outlasts a lot of the bugs trying to hit it big when the world melts down.&nbsp; If it does, their PM hedges won&#039;t come close to covering their losses anyway.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The bottom line is I don&#039;t want to get ripped off because of the panic -- look what happened to people on Y2K.&nbsp; That was a rip off.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Now I&#039;ve thought for a few minutes on numismatic investments.&nbsp; I don&#039;t want to bait flames or hurt any feelings now.&nbsp; I&#039;ve only thought for a few minutes mind you, so take it with a grain of salt.&nbsp; I realize that numismatic appreciation can be astronomical with some coins accumulating annual returns in value of hundreds of percent over many decades running.&nbsp; But what is the real track record in history?&nbsp; Today, antiquities are also valuable -- say Roman coins or something from ancient China or Egypt -- but how were they valued at other times?&nbsp; Did the Romans assign terrific value to Egyptian artifacts or was it just old junk?&nbsp; The Renaissance might have fostered a nostalgia for the old days, but the whole Dark Ages was a long period of history where only a few povertous monks were interested in collecting old debris.&nbsp; The bible records thousands of years of history but I can&#039;t think of a reference to the kind of sentimental value of ordinary objects that modern numismatics represents.&nbsp; Isn&#039;t it true that the bulk of coins with numismatic value are hardly extraordinary?&nbsp; </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Renaissance aristocracy and the nobility of the past had coin collections, but their collections were significant because of their antiquity and not the subtle nuances of modern numismatics with its varieties of mass-production classes, minting errors, the results of progressive die wear, and logs of total mintage figures.&nbsp; King Louis XIV would have a keen interest in coins from Pharoah&#039;s treasury, but he would find modern numismatics a dreadful bore stemming from nothing other than the the mania of the industrial monetary system&#039;s version of gongoozlers.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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