IrishGold
10-31-2003, 01:15 PM
This is an e'mail message I received from the Charleston Voice.
Note the reference we (GIM) received at the bottom!
I am going to send him the link to the big thread we had on 90% coins!
IrishGold
This link is from the Silver Bag Price Calculator link sent to you earlier.....it lends confirmation to my recent affirmation that uncirculatred rolls of the later issues, ie, the 1960s will turn out to be relatively scarcer than currently experienced. A $10 face roll of 1963 Franklins (the last year of production) will run you about $70 today where its melt value is only about $36. Bagged 90% halves of $1000 face whether they be Franklins or Walkers are not being offered as "junk" coins by any dealers that I could find. If they are found, they will certainly be at a premium above the dimes and quarters of the same period.
Return to Silver Bags (http://geocities.com/porfiry2000/silverbags)
Public Usenet posts, retrieved via google.com
Ellipses .... indicate removal of quoted material
-------------------------------------From: JS2Subject: Re: Silver coins - still being melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1995/06/17 ....Its too bad so many have been melted over the years, I remember hearing about dealers during the 1979-80 silver boom that would buy a Whitman folder of silver Roosevelts, Washington Quarters or Franklin Halves and just pop them out of the folder into a bag and send them off to the smelters of course they would save the key dates but the others would be smelted, who knows how rare some of these so called common dates are thesedays, maybe some of the quarters from the 1940's and 1950's are as rare or close to the 1932-D,S.
-------------------------------------From: MMDSubject: Re: Silver coins - still being melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1995/06/21 ....Uh, don't try this at home, kids! The commercial firms that reclaim silver alloyed with other metals use chemical methods. Basically they dissolve the coins or other material in nitric acid, using distilled water as dilutant. After the fizzing and pink smoke (!!) stop they add water and pour off, add sodium bicarbonate, stir, and add more acid with a bit of copper wire. Silver crystallizes on the wire. The result is washed, then the silver grains in the form of black powder are dried. The powder is then melted in a brick oven(temperature 1000 C or more). A similar process can get as little as 2% silver from scrap. Scrapsilver dealers have a preference for coins because they know what the silver content is before buying, but for other items they have to do an assay first.The above is from information told to me by others and not from first hand knowledge but is believed reliable.
--------------------------------------From: D3Subject: Re: How many silver coins have been melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coins Date: 1998/02/07 ....The treasury did not keep records in 1960 & i can assure you, no one was keeping records in '81, either. Massive amounts of even BU silver were melted without regard to denomination. I can tell you personal conversations (don't wanna name names on here, some of these guys are still in business) I've had where dealers reported melting down BU BAGS of Peace & Morgan dollars (remember silver was selling for $40 oz) and dollars have 3/4 oz of silver in them; those same dollars are worth about $9/per to "collectors" even today) It was a simple matter of economics. Take $30/pop now or try & sell them to collectors for $9, so into the melt pot they went, along with BU Roosevelts, Kennedy halfs, circ silver or BU it didn't matter. Those meltdowns did littleto bring up the "collector value" of the coins & I doubt the any current meltdown will affect the value for many years to come. All the collectors have their '64 Roosies, thank you & don't need any more. On the other hand, the little game being played by Mr Buffet has already got silver backed up 4-8 weeks at the refineries. That's why bags and even .999 is being discounted from spot. Dealers are sending their coins in to the refineries, but being told processing & payment will take up to 9-10 weeks...and they're not going to take a chance on silver being where it is today without hedging their bets...plus, they have to tie up their money for 2 mos & won't be able to buy more unless they borrow money to do it. It's the same thing that happened during the wild days of the early 80s...then coin silver was discounted as much as 50% from melt & even .999 was generally only bringing 80-90% of spot. There just isn't enough money to buy it all, or enough refinery capacity to process it all in such a short period of time. This is what sometimes you'll hear folks refer to a "squeeze" in supply. The silver is "for sale" by the current holders, but generally markets, such as the Comex & the London spot exchange, will only accept certified bars of certain purity & weight. If they're not in that form, they're not counted in warehouse or available stocks until they can be processed to that purity & weight. Even though it's "available" to be melted, the people who can convert it to a form for "Comex Warehouse" suitability cannot process it fast enough. Most of the savvy people understand this & are fearful of what the sudden influx of this "recovered" silver will do to the market over the next 4-8 weeks. That's also why Mr. Buffet offered to delay delivery of the 40,000,000 ozs that he is still owed for a "modest fee". He knows it will take time to make these things available & while he wants to make a killing, to be sure, his reputation is important to him also, plus legal authorities can be real nasty when you upset the smooth operation of markets. They found a way to "break" the Hunts, & I'm sure they could find a way to "break" anyone who causes too much chaos in the spot markets, too.. Mr. Buffet wants an orderly, gentle upward price curve, not panic. His announcement of delayed delivery availability was meant to calm the panic, while possibly paving the way for additional purchases if prices retreated. He didn't get to be the world's richest investor by painting himself into acorner.
--------------------------------------------------From: KBSubject: Re: How many silver coins have been melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1998/02/07 ....Virtually every Franklin half was "meltable" when silver hit $50 per ounce and smelters were paying around 30x face ($15 per half dollar).Circ, BU, proof, it didn't matter (except for pre-1955 proofs and a few earlydates in Choice BU), if it was a Franklin, it went in the bucket ... along with a ton of Walkers, Barbers and Seated halves as well. It was awful hard turning down $15 for a circ. common date Seated half back then, when they had been worth about $5 a year earlier... Many of the dealers were so swamped buying circ Roosy/Washington/Franklin sets in blue Whitman folders that they actually *burned* the folders in order to extract the coins as quickly as possible ... Since the coins were going to the smelter it didn't really matter if they picked up a singe mark or two in the process ...
--------------------------------------------------From: D3Subject: Re: How many silver coins have been melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1998/02/08 ....All I can tell you about 1980-81 was that at $11 per coin, very few guys I knew even bothered to check Franklins for dates...BU rolls, yes, but circs went thru the counters too fast for me to see the dates...and with redbook values at melt (or below due to printing lag time) I'm sure that no one else did, either.The closest redbook I have handy is a 1983 book. It was based on $9 silver & lists no premium on any circ Franklin of any date. Therefore, no premium would have existed at values of spot higher than that, I assume. This would strongly suggest a random melt with no emphasis on saving any date, except for sets or partials that were saved by collectors. I'm sure there were efforts to weed out the lower mintages & "keep" those instead of the 63s, for example, thus perhaps the "scarce dates" of the future will be a total surprise, but with silver values certain rise over the next fifty years, it still may not allow the individual dates to exceed their "silver value". If ALL silver halfs are worth $25-100 for melt, not many collectors will save them in any quantity. ;-) What all that says for collectors in the year 2098, I wouldn't care to speculate.
--------------------------------------------From: bfSubject: Re: 90% silver coins Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1998/10/28 > >I have been watching with some interest as silver spot prices edge lower and > >lower (now 4.95) while 90% silver coins close on 4.35 X face. > >Why are these bullion sources so richly priced right now???? > > Fear and greed. The Y2K end-of-the world hypesters have been > seriously promoting survival bags of silver and the supply is > getting VERY tight.Something similar happened in 1980. When silver prices skyrocketed and many people saw the potential to make a fortune, mainstream investment advisors said that you should only get "physical" silver in the form of 1 oz rounds,which would be easy to store and redeem in small dollar amounts, and that way you didn't take the risk of having bad "paper" silver. Since there were only so many rounds available at the time, it got to the point where dealers were paying $50 for rounds vs $42 spot. Oddly enough, bags of coins containing over 700 ounces of silver which should have sold at $35,000 with spot at $50 went begging at $25,000 (~70%of melt), and when silver dropped to $30 ($21,000 melt) bags dropped to $12,000 (~58% of melt). This was because the mainstream investment advisors didn't push silver coins (it was too hard to calculate how many ounces you owned, was their claim), combined with the fact that investors were frightened by the market downturn. So, not only was there no investor demand for the coins, but refineries were at capacity processing gold (also at record highs), and would typically onlytake silver with payment 90 days in the future at whatever the spot price was at that future date. Obviously, with multi-bag lots coming in daily, few dealers had the werewithal to wait 90 days to turn their investment, much less speculate on what spot would be in three months, so these bags had to be turned at whatever the cash price was, regardless of discount from spot.
----------------------------------------------From: D3Subject: Re: Were Silver coins destroyed During the Hunt Years? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 2000/04/21....Not only were junk silver coins destroyed, but I have talked to dealers who personally melted dozens of bags of original BU Peace dollars and other similar material. BU Peace dollars were worth nearly $30 in silver for a period of time and there were no buyers for them at that level. Many knew that the "bubble" couldn't last & didn't want to get stuck at the lower levels they knew were coming. The only "ready" buyers were the refineries. Much the same thing happened to sterling flatware and silverware sets. When nice material came in, it had to be evaluated on the basis of a much lower silver price and the lack of buyers. Even the Uncirculated stuff failed the test many times. I'm sure hundreds of bags of BU 60s silver dimes quarters and halfs were melted right out of the gov't bags they were in. But the shocker to me was that even BU dollar bags were melted. On the other hand, how would you like to have "saved" one of those $30/coin bags and be in possession of it today--20 years of inflation and storage later?
--------------------------------------------From: STLSubject: Re: Were Silver coins destroyed During the Hunt Years? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 2000/04/21 ....At the height of the silver boom in early 1980 I looked into assembling bags of silver US coins and selling them to refiners. I contacted several refiners that I could locate. Each one said the same thing; they had hundreds of bags waiting to be melted and did not need any more at the time.At that time you could make $6000 profit by melting 1 bag of silver,and selling the 999 pure bars on the cash market. It surprises me that any 90% silver still exists!! This phenomena has existed periodically many times since 1980. In fact, currently many bags are being melted because of 90% bags selling for less than melt value.
---------------------------------------------If you are up for more, here is a great thread from GoldIsMoney (http://www.goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=2584&page=2&pp=30).
Return to Silver Bags (http://geocities.com/porfiry2000/silverbags) </FONT>
Note the reference we (GIM) received at the bottom!
I am going to send him the link to the big thread we had on 90% coins!
IrishGold
This link is from the Silver Bag Price Calculator link sent to you earlier.....it lends confirmation to my recent affirmation that uncirculatred rolls of the later issues, ie, the 1960s will turn out to be relatively scarcer than currently experienced. A $10 face roll of 1963 Franklins (the last year of production) will run you about $70 today where its melt value is only about $36. Bagged 90% halves of $1000 face whether they be Franklins or Walkers are not being offered as "junk" coins by any dealers that I could find. If they are found, they will certainly be at a premium above the dimes and quarters of the same period.
Return to Silver Bags (http://geocities.com/porfiry2000/silverbags)
Public Usenet posts, retrieved via google.com
Ellipses .... indicate removal of quoted material
-------------------------------------From: JS2Subject: Re: Silver coins - still being melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1995/06/17 ....Its too bad so many have been melted over the years, I remember hearing about dealers during the 1979-80 silver boom that would buy a Whitman folder of silver Roosevelts, Washington Quarters or Franklin Halves and just pop them out of the folder into a bag and send them off to the smelters of course they would save the key dates but the others would be smelted, who knows how rare some of these so called common dates are thesedays, maybe some of the quarters from the 1940's and 1950's are as rare or close to the 1932-D,S.
-------------------------------------From: MMDSubject: Re: Silver coins - still being melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1995/06/21 ....Uh, don't try this at home, kids! The commercial firms that reclaim silver alloyed with other metals use chemical methods. Basically they dissolve the coins or other material in nitric acid, using distilled water as dilutant. After the fizzing and pink smoke (!!) stop they add water and pour off, add sodium bicarbonate, stir, and add more acid with a bit of copper wire. Silver crystallizes on the wire. The result is washed, then the silver grains in the form of black powder are dried. The powder is then melted in a brick oven(temperature 1000 C or more). A similar process can get as little as 2% silver from scrap. Scrapsilver dealers have a preference for coins because they know what the silver content is before buying, but for other items they have to do an assay first.The above is from information told to me by others and not from first hand knowledge but is believed reliable.
--------------------------------------From: D3Subject: Re: How many silver coins have been melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coins Date: 1998/02/07 ....The treasury did not keep records in 1960 & i can assure you, no one was keeping records in '81, either. Massive amounts of even BU silver were melted without regard to denomination. I can tell you personal conversations (don't wanna name names on here, some of these guys are still in business) I've had where dealers reported melting down BU BAGS of Peace & Morgan dollars (remember silver was selling for $40 oz) and dollars have 3/4 oz of silver in them; those same dollars are worth about $9/per to "collectors" even today) It was a simple matter of economics. Take $30/pop now or try & sell them to collectors for $9, so into the melt pot they went, along with BU Roosevelts, Kennedy halfs, circ silver or BU it didn't matter. Those meltdowns did littleto bring up the "collector value" of the coins & I doubt the any current meltdown will affect the value for many years to come. All the collectors have their '64 Roosies, thank you & don't need any more. On the other hand, the little game being played by Mr Buffet has already got silver backed up 4-8 weeks at the refineries. That's why bags and even .999 is being discounted from spot. Dealers are sending their coins in to the refineries, but being told processing & payment will take up to 9-10 weeks...and they're not going to take a chance on silver being where it is today without hedging their bets...plus, they have to tie up their money for 2 mos & won't be able to buy more unless they borrow money to do it. It's the same thing that happened during the wild days of the early 80s...then coin silver was discounted as much as 50% from melt & even .999 was generally only bringing 80-90% of spot. There just isn't enough money to buy it all, or enough refinery capacity to process it all in such a short period of time. This is what sometimes you'll hear folks refer to a "squeeze" in supply. The silver is "for sale" by the current holders, but generally markets, such as the Comex & the London spot exchange, will only accept certified bars of certain purity & weight. If they're not in that form, they're not counted in warehouse or available stocks until they can be processed to that purity & weight. Even though it's "available" to be melted, the people who can convert it to a form for "Comex Warehouse" suitability cannot process it fast enough. Most of the savvy people understand this & are fearful of what the sudden influx of this "recovered" silver will do to the market over the next 4-8 weeks. That's also why Mr. Buffet offered to delay delivery of the 40,000,000 ozs that he is still owed for a "modest fee". He knows it will take time to make these things available & while he wants to make a killing, to be sure, his reputation is important to him also, plus legal authorities can be real nasty when you upset the smooth operation of markets. They found a way to "break" the Hunts, & I'm sure they could find a way to "break" anyone who causes too much chaos in the spot markets, too.. Mr. Buffet wants an orderly, gentle upward price curve, not panic. His announcement of delayed delivery availability was meant to calm the panic, while possibly paving the way for additional purchases if prices retreated. He didn't get to be the world's richest investor by painting himself into acorner.
--------------------------------------------------From: KBSubject: Re: How many silver coins have been melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1998/02/07 ....Virtually every Franklin half was "meltable" when silver hit $50 per ounce and smelters were paying around 30x face ($15 per half dollar).Circ, BU, proof, it didn't matter (except for pre-1955 proofs and a few earlydates in Choice BU), if it was a Franklin, it went in the bucket ... along with a ton of Walkers, Barbers and Seated halves as well. It was awful hard turning down $15 for a circ. common date Seated half back then, when they had been worth about $5 a year earlier... Many of the dealers were so swamped buying circ Roosy/Washington/Franklin sets in blue Whitman folders that they actually *burned* the folders in order to extract the coins as quickly as possible ... Since the coins were going to the smelter it didn't really matter if they picked up a singe mark or two in the process ...
--------------------------------------------------From: D3Subject: Re: How many silver coins have been melted? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1998/02/08 ....All I can tell you about 1980-81 was that at $11 per coin, very few guys I knew even bothered to check Franklins for dates...BU rolls, yes, but circs went thru the counters too fast for me to see the dates...and with redbook values at melt (or below due to printing lag time) I'm sure that no one else did, either.The closest redbook I have handy is a 1983 book. It was based on $9 silver & lists no premium on any circ Franklin of any date. Therefore, no premium would have existed at values of spot higher than that, I assume. This would strongly suggest a random melt with no emphasis on saving any date, except for sets or partials that were saved by collectors. I'm sure there were efforts to weed out the lower mintages & "keep" those instead of the 63s, for example, thus perhaps the "scarce dates" of the future will be a total surprise, but with silver values certain rise over the next fifty years, it still may not allow the individual dates to exceed their "silver value". If ALL silver halfs are worth $25-100 for melt, not many collectors will save them in any quantity. ;-) What all that says for collectors in the year 2098, I wouldn't care to speculate.
--------------------------------------------From: bfSubject: Re: 90% silver coins Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 1998/10/28 > >I have been watching with some interest as silver spot prices edge lower and > >lower (now 4.95) while 90% silver coins close on 4.35 X face. > >Why are these bullion sources so richly priced right now???? > > Fear and greed. The Y2K end-of-the world hypesters have been > seriously promoting survival bags of silver and the supply is > getting VERY tight.Something similar happened in 1980. When silver prices skyrocketed and many people saw the potential to make a fortune, mainstream investment advisors said that you should only get "physical" silver in the form of 1 oz rounds,which would be easy to store and redeem in small dollar amounts, and that way you didn't take the risk of having bad "paper" silver. Since there were only so many rounds available at the time, it got to the point where dealers were paying $50 for rounds vs $42 spot. Oddly enough, bags of coins containing over 700 ounces of silver which should have sold at $35,000 with spot at $50 went begging at $25,000 (~70%of melt), and when silver dropped to $30 ($21,000 melt) bags dropped to $12,000 (~58% of melt). This was because the mainstream investment advisors didn't push silver coins (it was too hard to calculate how many ounces you owned, was their claim), combined with the fact that investors were frightened by the market downturn. So, not only was there no investor demand for the coins, but refineries were at capacity processing gold (also at record highs), and would typically onlytake silver with payment 90 days in the future at whatever the spot price was at that future date. Obviously, with multi-bag lots coming in daily, few dealers had the werewithal to wait 90 days to turn their investment, much less speculate on what spot would be in three months, so these bags had to be turned at whatever the cash price was, regardless of discount from spot.
----------------------------------------------From: D3Subject: Re: Were Silver coins destroyed During the Hunt Years? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 2000/04/21....Not only were junk silver coins destroyed, but I have talked to dealers who personally melted dozens of bags of original BU Peace dollars and other similar material. BU Peace dollars were worth nearly $30 in silver for a period of time and there were no buyers for them at that level. Many knew that the "bubble" couldn't last & didn't want to get stuck at the lower levels they knew were coming. The only "ready" buyers were the refineries. Much the same thing happened to sterling flatware and silverware sets. When nice material came in, it had to be evaluated on the basis of a much lower silver price and the lack of buyers. Even the Uncirculated stuff failed the test many times. I'm sure hundreds of bags of BU 60s silver dimes quarters and halfs were melted right out of the gov't bags they were in. But the shocker to me was that even BU dollar bags were melted. On the other hand, how would you like to have "saved" one of those $30/coin bags and be in possession of it today--20 years of inflation and storage later?
--------------------------------------------From: STLSubject: Re: Were Silver coins destroyed During the Hunt Years? Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coinsDate: 2000/04/21 ....At the height of the silver boom in early 1980 I looked into assembling bags of silver US coins and selling them to refiners. I contacted several refiners that I could locate. Each one said the same thing; they had hundreds of bags waiting to be melted and did not need any more at the time.At that time you could make $6000 profit by melting 1 bag of silver,and selling the 999 pure bars on the cash market. It surprises me that any 90% silver still exists!! This phenomena has existed periodically many times since 1980. In fact, currently many bags are being melted because of 90% bags selling for less than melt value.
---------------------------------------------If you are up for more, here is a great thread from GoldIsMoney (http://www.goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=2584&page=2&pp=30).
Return to Silver Bags (http://geocities.com/porfiry2000/silverbags) </FONT>