Posing a question about Gresham's Law and..

ormandh

how it possibly has affected the mintage figures of 18th, 19th, or even 20th century gold and silver coinage? I am still trying to wrap my head around the possibility of how precious metals were distributed around the world and NOT have been melted at some point in time. Especially taking into account, for arguments sake, that Numismatists were probably not so informed early on about how valuable a coin could be long-term. With that question being posed, why are there SO MANY well circulated silver coinage from the 18th and 19th century available. There has to be some sort of set number of coins which survived in UNC, but I would guess that it is lower than we could imagine. Is there any particular country that comes to mind that might have escaped the collector, either by necessity or for the lack of bad money?

I have many other points to add as responses are entered into the discussion. I really look forward to some educated insight from this great forum!

-Dan

Rickc300

Or possibly by the rapid devaluation of coinage? Germany at the end of WWI comes to mind, a silver mark could buy a wheel barrow full of paper marks that on "paper" was worth millions of marks, it was cheaper at times to burn paper money than to buy wood. There seems to be a large amount of silver in uncirculated (or almost) condition compared to the years before the war. Maybe "real" coinage was so valuable as to be almost non existant in day to day life as everyone was hoarding it... On the other hand, pre WWI the coinage can be so worn as to be identifiable (Prussian stuff comes to mind) but dates and details are worn away by circulation. Not melted because loose coinage was needed and the mintage figures for the period were far less than what was needed by the day to day commerce needed in a growing economy of a fast growing Empire.

Just my thoughts...

Rick

ormandh

I understand that, but if silver was worth more than the actually face value then it would escape the system, so to speak and be either melted or hoarded. If it was significantly worth more than face value it would seem to be melted down and sold for scrap or used in, for instance, "coin silver" eating utensils or the like. In gold's case, would it not have been melted for jewelry? Or even better yet, when platinum was used as coinage, would it not have seen the smelter?

Rickc300

As far as Platinum... I have harvested one and witnessed many more lightning rods being hauled away for scrap metal. Platinum is not really a precious metal and has been used for many mundane uses... Including the use of lightning rods here in the USA. I wish I had the weight in Platinum in ounces versus the pounds I sold my lightning rod find for...

Gold and Silver on the other hand, is another story of the times as far as so called "scrap" metal goes.
Got any you wnt to part with?

Rick

ormandh

Okay, forget what I said before.

My main question is what kept the silver and gold coinage, from the different eras, from being melted down for other uses and how do we know how much has been taken out of the mintage numbers. The reason I am asking this is to get to the second question; How does this affect mintage numbers, especially in countries that did NOT need the coinage as circulating coinage. Did it go to the smelter or did it get hoarded? According to Gresham if it was not needed it went away from the intended circulating society and was possibly used for other things. ie: jewelry, other coins, etc...

JCMhouston

We'll porbably never know, but my feeling is a lot of it wound up being hoarded as coinage. The reason I believe this is that the coins themselves provided a ready means of identifying the amount and fineness of precious metals with no need to go through another assay. I am sure some of it was melted down to be recoined, made into jewelry or whatever, but enough high grade coins of the period exist to lead me to believe a lot of it remained in it's original coined form.

In base metals you could show that theory is completely wrong however. As an example the halfpennies of Geo. III from 1770-1775. These were apparantly taken out of circulation almost as soon as they were minted and often recoined into lightweight counterfeits. In my experience there are more counterfeits available of those dates than original coins.