• HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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    6 days ago

    These coins will never circulate.

    Commemorative coins like this are usually sold at a significant markup (even beyond the fact a “silver dollar” has about $30 worth of silver at today’s bullion prices. Some of the markup is often set aside for a fund-raising purpose.

    These will go directly into the albums of coin collectors, who to be blunt, tend to skew old, white, and MAGA. (If you go to a coin show, there will be plenty of right wing and Trump paraphernalia).

    The ironic thing is that “really successful” commemorative coins tend to not appreciate well, because they glut any market. The most valuable modern coins tend to be either stuff that was deliberately underproduced (example: the 1996-W silver eagle that was only available with the purchase of almost two ounces of gold coins) or stuff that was ugly and unexciting and so they produced far less than the original allotment.

    There are plenty of people who drag down their inheritance of 1970s proof sets, mail-order/shop-at-home products that are $10 worth of coin in $100 worth of packaging, high-markup bullion items, and market-glut commemoratives, just to discover that Grandpa should have bought AAPL instead. Often the “investment” didn’t even beat inflation, and in the worst cases, they actually lost money in nominal dollar terms. I suspect a bag full of Kirk dollars would be a red flag to any appraiser in 2050.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 days ago

      AKA the Beanie Baby Effect. Everyone thought beanie babies were going to be collectibles, so everyone hoarded them and tried to keep them in good condition. The result is that they’re all basically worthless, because everyone who would want them already has them.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Yup. Baseball cards too. When I was young, an uncle would always buy me a complete set of baseball cards for that year. Well, turns out when every baseball card collector is doing the same thing, there really isn’t any scarcity. They were 60 bucks a set in the 90s and they’re 60 bucks on ebay today.

    • F_State@midwest.social
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      6 days ago

      Reminds me of comic books. Comic books had a boom, with some selling multiple versions of the same issue with different covers “for collectors” and enthusiasts snapped them all up, kept them safe, stored them in plastic, went out of their way to make sure their collections were complete, only to fall on hard times and find out their collections were worth a fraction of what they spent on them when they tried to sell. Turns out that the Early Spiderman or Superman comics were worth alot of money because most printed copies ended up in the trash creating scarcity.

    • janNatan@lemmy.ml
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      6 days ago

      Have you even considered that the coins are shiny-shiny? Well worth the investment.