Price trends for coins

BDP

can someone explain the price trends that coins has experienced over the past 20 years? please touch upon the coin crash in the early 1990's that Anaconda mentioned in one of his posts.

Thanks

DaveG

Well, very briefly (and I was out of the coin market until the early '90s) (Do pardon the sweeping generalizations)

In 1979 and early 1980, gold and silver zoomed up, which drove coin prices way up. Bullion prices crashed in early 1980, which stunned the coin market for a little while, but then(!), PCGS and NGC were formed in 1986 and 1987 and Wall Street formed a few limited partnerships to buy coins.

The coin market then took off for a couple of years, but then crashed in 1989 (I believe).

The coin market then went into a deep snooze for several years. (When I first started going to coin shows in late 1992, you could roll a bowling ball down the aisles without fear of hitting anyone; coin dealers were eager to make a sale [any sale] and they really didn't want to buy coins - almost any coin you showed them was either overgraded [if in a slab] or was a 'problem coin' [if raw].)

The coin market finally started showing more activity in the mid-to-late 1990s and has been strengthening ever since.

If you want to talk price activity, you'd have to talk about a specific coin series. I believe that Coin World has historical price Trends on-line for subscribers, for example.