THE PROBLEM OF POSTMODERN "COIN" ISSUES

In July of last year, American publisher Krause Publications released the 10th edition of The Standard Catalog of World Coins: 2001-Date. This book serves as the most comprehensive encyclopedia of all coins struck by or for each country in the world, tracking issues starting with Afghanistan’s decimal coins and ending with the dollar coinage of Zimbabwe.

At 1,344 pages, The Standard Catalog of World Coins: 2001-Date is an impressive volume. But the prodigious output of new coin designs from each of the world’s mints has not only rendered this book obsolete, but rendered the concept of a single-volume encyclopedia devoted to 21st-century world coins untenable.

Consider this.

Since its debut in 2007, The Standard Catalog of World Coins: 2001-Date has increased in size by an average of 118 pages per year. Should the annual output of new coins from the world’s mints continue at this pace, the 94th edition of The Standard Catalog (which, one assumes, would be scheduled for publication in the year 2100) would exceed 11,000 pages. This assumes that coins will continue to be produced and that the medium doesn’t find itself replaced by digital or altogether different forms of payment.

Which means that, by the end of this century, the number of new coin designs issued by the world mints will dwarf the entirety of all known coinage struck from the middle ages to the year 2000.

But that’s nothing compared to the actual number of pieces struck.

The United States Mint alone has already struck more than 180 billion coins. That number could exceed one trillion circulating coins by the end of the century. Add to that all of the circulating coins that will be struck by every nation across the globe. The number of coins that will be produced this century (ceteris paribus) will be simply staggering.

And believe it or not, despite the fact that almost none of the coin issues will be what one would naturally consider rare, there will still be a built-in collector base for them. Coin collectors of all ages and experience levels have traditionally enjoyed collecting their country’s circulating coinage. For many, discovering and accumulating the older coins that circulate alongside newer ones is the first act of a budding collector.

After doing this a while, it becomes apparent to these collectors that there are gaps in their collection, coins they can’t find. Perhaps they will buy an informative book or magazine, or read about their preferred series online. And in order to acquire these missing coins–the coins they couldn’t find in their change–collectors have trade for them or buy them from other collectors or coin dealers. It is at this point that new coin collectors enter the numismatic marketplace.

But even as global circulating coin production pushes into the trillions, circulating coins aren’t the cause of the explosive growth of Krause’s Standard Catalog and these coins pose little threat to the rare coin industry as it’s currently constituted. Instead, the cause of that irruption belongs to the seemingly endless cavalcade of collector coin issues, the vast majority of them to be struck at mints that operate not as government bureaucracies but as for-profit businesses.

And as these corporate mints have become innovators and leaders in the marketplace, the more traditionally-structured mints have followed suit. The result of this industry transformation has been a dramatic redefinition of what a coin is as a physical object; as a social construct; and what role the coin-producing mints play in the numismatic marketplace.

And while it’s safe to say that a viable market in bullion coins – that is, precious metals coins sold at or near the current market price for their constituent metal – is thriving and supported by a sophisticated network of retailers, wholesalers and consumers, the same cannot be said about precious metals coins that are issued for premiums well above the coin’s intrinsic value.

This is a problem. For coins, unlike cars, computers, or other consumables, do not get used up and discarded. Instead, they are purchased with the belief that they are a store of value and the expectation that this value will increase over time.

Without a proportionally-sized and well-developed secondary market, these goals cannot be realized.

To read the complete article, see:
The Coming Collector Coin Supernova and Its Ramifications for World Mints and the Numismatic Marketplace (www.coinweek.com/opinion/editorials/coming-collector-coin-supernova-ramifications-world-mints-numismatic-marketplace/)

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