Mint selfishness? Or greediness?

[gxseries]

Something that I have been wondering from time to time and it seems to apply throughout the whole world.

 

Traditionally most of the world mints would mint commemorative coins out of silver coins, which could be in between 20-31.1grams of silver or it could be slightly more. It could also be gold, but the key point is that they had to be sellable or the mints would be forced to buy such coins back and remelt them. And it had happened before.

 

Nowadays, mints would "selfishly" mint coins and market them at some ridicious prices. Taking the example of an ounce of silver commemorative coin - bullion wise, one ounce of silver is around 7.6USD at today's market value. Market price of such commemorative coins? I wouldn't be suprised if it's around 25 dollars when the mint first produces the coins. Maybe that's due to minting, packaging, transportation etc. Fair enough but how about giant coins, such as troy pound, 5oz, 10oz, kilo coins or even 1/2 ounce coins?

 

My first question is how close can you get them to the bullion values? It seems to be quite difficult or impossible. Of course as this is a numismatic world, you have to expect them to be more expensive over the melt value. But again, are the mints targeting this so that an average collector cannot possibly complete a collection? Taking an instance of the big and naughty coins ever minted, such as the Australian 10,000 dollar kilo platinum coin, Austrian 100,000 Euro 31kilo gold coin, and Russia 200 rubles 3 kilo silver coin. Mintage wise, there are not too many of those, as all of them except for the 3 kilo coin are a lot less than 50.

 

Even with small islands, they seem to mint very popular themes and yet mint them at very scarce mintage to force price to be very high. Yes, the evilness of economics...

 

Is this part of the evil mint scheme? Or they are just targeting the highest end of numismatic collectors???

 

Feel free to take a look at some of the evil Russian mintage these few years... it's already somewhat a 6 figure project if you are to collect every single piece minted since 1992.

 

Bank of Russia

[Conder101]

They are targeting those people who have a LOT of money and who think that just because the mintage is low it is SURE to go up in value. People who don't understand that if there is increase in demand (or any demand) there will be no increase in value no matter how "rare" it is. In fact since anyone who actually had the money and wanted one already has it, usually the only place for the value to go is down.