Circulating Silver Coinage
Earendil
Posts: 243 ✭✭
I know that I can read about it forever, but I would like to get some opinions from those out there that are old enough to remember this era... when did silver coinage actually become impossible to find in circulation? And, feeding off of this, when did the 40% silver half-dollars disappear?
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I was born in 1965 with the advent of clad coinage, so I am a little too young to remember the vanishing of 90% silver from circulation. By the time I was a kid who was paying attention (I started collecting just before age 11) , the circulating silver was pretty much long gone. But Wheaties were of course still common, often two or three to a roll, as I recall.
Another silver coin beside the 40% halves that is still out there in circulation are the war nickels. I still find some every time I get a sizeable enough batch of nickel rolls from the bank.
Menomonee Falls Wisconsin USA
http://www.pcgs.com/SetRegistr...dset.aspx?s=68269&ac=1">Musky 1861 Mint Set
race was on.
Something alot of people don't know and didn't even know it then. Up until 1967 you could exchange
silver certificates for 90% silver pellets. I just sold 2lb 4oz to ACSB.
Jerry
this time but it wasn't great enough to get most people to act. Much of
the silver was just buried by the huge clad mintages so the casual observer
might think most wasa gone but it was probably closer to only about half gone.
A lot of what was in circulation were heavily picked over coins, very low grade, and
1964 issues. (except few '64 halfs). In mid-'68 the FED started separating out the
silver and it began disappearing very rapidly. They used inertial separators which
are very inexpensive to build and operate. By mid-'69 there wasn't enough remain-
ing in circulation to bother to continue the separation process and it was discontinued.
The public and collectors had the job complete by 1971. There were, no doubt, some
coins which had been in private accumulations which still appeared from time to time
and these could be locally important but there were so few by this time as to consider
them gone. There are no longer any silver coins, wheat cents, or other obsolete type
in circulation. Those seen are just coins rereleased by collectors and most have achieved
a sort of steady state in change; as fast as someone takes one out, someone else puts
one in circulation. Silver won't work in machines and obsolete coins are held back by the
public.
In answer to the question I'd estimate that the amount of silver in circulation first hit a
steady state in late 1970. The percentage has varied over the years dependent on sil-
ver price and the economy.
What part of the country are you in?
In Massachusetts I still consider wheat cents as circulating. I find about 1 in every 100 cents.
I have found silver in circulation this year, but that is truly a rare event.
I remember significant quantities of war nickels being pulled out of circulation and melted in 1964-65, even while other silver coins were still being struck with the frozen 1964 date.
I think that war nickels are scarcer (in relation to their original mintage) than other silver coins. Not only did they have a head start on being melted, they also were less popular and less practical than 90% bags for building privately held accumulations. To this day, war nickels carry a higher discount to their silver value than dimes, quarters and halves.
My Adolph A. Weinman signature
There was immediately a great deal of hoarding in '65 by many people and small businesses.
However, in answer to the question, I'd say around '68-'69 was about the end of finding much. It was there but sparse. I'd agree that dimes were more prevalent than anything else. By the time I was in college in the early '70's, it was pretty much all gone. Sure, you could find the occasional dime here and there and halves were already rare in any form.
If you went to the bank and bought a bag of halves in around '72-'74, you could find probably 30% in 90% silver and the rest mostly 40%, but that ended shortly thereafter. What wasn't pulled out by the people was pulled out by bank tellers and the Fed when the bags came back in.
The age of half dollars in circulation essentially ended around 1970, give or take a year and depending on what part of the country one was in.
John Marnard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 235ff
<< <i>
In Massachusetts I still consider wheat cents as circulating. I find about 1 in every 100 cents.
I have found silver in circulation this year, but that is truly a rare event. >>
I'm in the midwest, near Chicago.
The number of wheat cents has fluctuated more than most other
obsolete type here and has never gotten as high as 1% since they
disappeared in the '73-'76 era. They've varied between about .1%
and .25%.
Some of my definitions may be a little different. For a coin to be in
circulation it has to be actually changing hands randomly. Just be-
cause a bank has rolls of halfs or there are lots of wheats in the de-
posits of a specific customer doesn't mean these coins are circulat-
ing. Even if they get out of the bank and to a commercial customer,
they aren't circulating until they get to a bank again.
If you really have 1% wheat cents there then there's a good possi-
bility that they are actually circulating, but it seems improbable that
there could really be so many.
It's not extremely unusual for large batches of "contaminated" coins
to get into local circulation and color it for weeks. Usually this is
caused by old pallets coming out of storage at the mint or FED but,
obviousdly there are no pallets so old. There are, however, huge pri-
vate accumulations of pennies sometimes hauled off to the bank by
old-time accumulators. Unless you know otherwise, I'd assume that
this is the source for the wheats in your area. In only a few weeks
these coins will start mixing in with the circulating coinage and every-
thing will return to normal.
Sometimes there will be specific sources for this sort of thing as well.
For instance there might be a coin collector trying to reintroduce these
coins by spending them at a specific restaurant or the like and you're
picking them up there.
If it's a small sample then it can simply be luck of the draw that you get
a lot of them.
There isn't much true circulation of cents because they tend to flow
from the mint to the end consumer who stashes them in jars or tosses
them in the garbage. Other coins get spent and respent so many times
that they wear down as they move randomly across the country, but the
cent is more local in nature and sees little wear. If there's really 1% in
circulation there then this would imply that almost all the wheats (or at
least the common dates) are still in circulation there. This would be the
first I've heard of it.
<< <i>The 40% silver half dollars still haven't completely disappeared. If you can get half dollars from your local bank at all, they're worth looking through. Lots of the general public are aware that pre-1965 coins were silver, but few outside the numismatic community are aware of the 40% coins. >>
That's generally the denomination that I go through to do my silver hunting (and I usually find lots of 40% silver halves). I picked up a fair amount of silver nickels, dimes, and quarters when I was working as a cashier, but then I just looked through what was given to me, and put aside the keepers. I didn't have to go out and buy entire boxes to sort through at home. And from what I've heard about the lack of silver in quarter boxes, and its relative rarity in dime ones, I'm not too keen on buying any. I go through nickels sometimes, but have not found anything good, just old, relatively worthless circulated ones. So I just stick with half-dollars. The findings have been very dry as of late, but sometimes it's like that. I've only found two 40% silver halves in the past month and a half.
<< <i>I wonder how many old coins would still be in circulation if they had not been made of silver. >>
A good way to tell:
The next time you get a nickel that is dated 1964 or earlier...That would probably be a good indicator...
after '64. I think that it stayed in circulation a bit longer here due to the slots.
bob
Unfortunately, I didn't have anyone to sell the silver coins to (for a premium, that is), so I quickly ran out of "capital" to finance my accumulation of silver.
Check out the Southern Gold Society
I was born in 1968 and remember being nine or ten and my step-father's business buying up lots of change from the bank and going through it for silver when their ceiling (acoustical?) business was slow. That would be in central Michigan in 1977 or 1978.
I tend to think the source for a lot of wheat coins is elder parents dying and their children just taking the accumulations to a bank.
I further think this accounts for why the bicentennial quarters have seemed to make a comeback in the past year. Adults who hoarded the 1976 quarters are dying and their heirs ask a coin dealer if they are valuable. Once the dealer tells them the coins aren't valuable they are dumped into circulation.
Up until recently I went through lots of nickels. It is almost an empirical law that 1% will be 1962 or prior.