Welcome back to Something About Coins! The U.S. Mint dropped the bomb on collectors today when they announced all of the collector products they won't release this year.
When the U.S. Mint announced the sale of the one oz. American Gold Buffalo and Platinum Eagle Proof Coins, it also said it won't offer proof or circulated collector versions of the American Silver Eagles one oz. coins. Also on the "won't" list are the one oz. uncirculated Gold American Eagles and any Proof Gold Eagles. The announcement included more. Dave Harper balanced the no Eagles - yes Buffaloes on his Buzz blog. And SilverCoinsToday.com further discussed the canceled Silver Eagle coins.
Since the uncirculated gold American Eagle won't be coming out, will demand for 2009 UHR Double Eagles rise? Harry Miller wrote in an article on NumisMaster.com yesterday, before the Mint's bombshell, that demand is already high for Mint State-65 2009 UHR's. He said the price is well above $2,000 and increasing pretty much weekly.
Interestingly, Miller's opening statement was that early type coins are currently weak in high grades, which is the same message Doug Winter has been giving in his articles about under appreciated early gold coins. Winter's most recent post is his top ten list of the most undervalued or under priced Liberty Head gold coins and reasons why. His list includes the 1827 Quarter Eagle, 1805 Bust Right Half Eagle, and 1806 Pointed 6 Half Eagle.
The story of the 500 year old Portuguese shipwreck discovered last year on a diamond mine off the coast of Africa has surfaced again. National Geographic did a nice new write up on it in their October online edition. If you don't remember, about 2,000 gold coins were found at the site, and many were Spanish coins. The coins that helped identify the ship, however, were the rare 1525-1538 dated Portuguese gold coins.
I love articles about how coins can be clues to history, so I can't help mentioning this one too. Scientists are arguing about ancient Rome's population, and hoards of buried ancient coins could hold the answer, as reported by a UConn biologist and Stanford historian in an article for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since I can't link to the full original scientific article, I picked one blog on Discovery.com. Although it doesn't demonstrate the mathematical formula, it did summarize their theory and contained a nice photo of a Denarius of Augustus,17 B.C.
Sticking with a mathematical theme, I'm including a link to a funny article from the New York Times asking if we need a 37-cent coin. Also in the article is one of the odd cents of long ago, the 3 Cent Piece. As it turns out, the 3-Cent Piece is efficient, if we can just do the math.
Thanks for reading! I hope you visit again tomorrow!
License for phpBay Pro is invalid.