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Gold/Mining/Energy : Silver prices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Canuck Dave who wrote (6103)	11/9/2002 12:55:24 AM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 8010

CD, I can answer a couple of your questions. It was after 1966 that silver coins started to disappear to be melted down. By 1968, it was all cupro-nickel and all pre-1968 silver coins simply disappeared from circulation. I think you're confusing gold and silver certificates as far as confiscation goes. Silver dropped in price during the depression until for political reasons the US government began buying large quantities of it, until by 1950 they had over a billion ounces. I don't think silver certificates were ever affected. What the US government did do was renege on gold certificates in 1933, (no more redemption for gold, a process called in specie payments). Roosevelt then confiscated all US gold holdings at 22$ per ounce and revalued the gold to 35$ an ounce, neatly reflating the currency. Deflation is here again, so expect something like that again when the Democrats get back in in 2003. Thanks. I didn't say anything about confiscation. AFAIK, silver certificates were guaranteed to be redeemable in a specific legal weight of silver in effect at least, although the weight presumably changed over time, at least as often as the official price of gold changed. Maybe I'm wrong about the redeemability, but I doubt it. If a given face value of silver certificate was legally redeemable by a given weight of silver at a given time, it seems certain that variations in the price of silver must have resulted in both premiums and discounts to face value at various times. It is the historical range of those premiums and discounts that is my primary interest. Regards, Don

To: Canuck Dave who wrote (6103)	11/9/2002 1:00:10 AM
From: goldsheet	Respond to of 8010

<It was after 1966 that silver coins started to disappear to be melted down. By 1968, it was all cupro-nickel and all pre-1968 silver coins simply disappeared from circulation.> In the US, silver was 90% 1964 and before, and I started pulling it in 1965. Other kids had a paper route, I went to the bank every Friday to get bank rolls. From 1965-to-1970 halves were 40% silver and got pulled after that. I was still pulling decent quantities of silver out of pocket change into the mid 1970s. Recent finds are few and far between, but I have a 1941 quarter and a 1945s war nickel that I pulled from change in the last year. The other point I would make is that stuff was pulled from circulation and put into $1000 90% junk bags that were actively traded in the 1970s. Serious melting of these bags did not occur until the 1979-1980 timeframe.