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

To: Ray Hughes who wrote (1083)	5/6/1998 9:29:00 PM
From: Alan Whirlwind	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8010

Ray, I would suppose a lot of that antique silver is too collectible right now for smelting anytime, but you may be right about the coins. We did melt a large number of ours 25-30 years ago, but then again, I see plenty of Canadian silver coins available at shows. Then too, when silver was $5 or under, it found its way back out there again in many recyclable forms I'm sure. This market is so jittery any new temporary source could tank it on a dime. I heard Golman Sachs dumped a position this week incurring our present losses. Come to think of it, before plating the silver was used close to its pure form, 90% or better, so an antiqe piece weighing a pound probably would get smelted at $9 or $10 an oz. --Al

To: Ray Hughes who wrote (1083)	5/7/1998 11:44:00 AM
From: Achilles	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8010

Ray, I bumped into an interesting story to confirm your analysis. A friend of mine owned a coin-operated laundry in the seventies, and when the value of silver in pre-66 coins began to exceed the face value of the coinage in the mid- to late-seventies, she began to cull the silver out of the takings every night. I remember this because I was a teenager, a friend of her son, and she would have these silver sorting parties. I bumped into her a few months ago, and we were talking about old times, and these sorting parties came up. Anyway, here's the punch-line: she still has all the silver. She never sold a dime of it; she held it right through the bubble of 79/80. The face value must be in the thousands. Anyway, as you point out, no one knows how many hoards of silver coins are out there like this one. If the price spikes, silver like this will come back into the market and help meet the demand for silver.