I’m bored with the America The Beautiful Quarters Program.
I’m bored with the commemorative coins that is produced by the U.S. Mint.
I’m bored with soap opera surrounding what U.S. Mint is going to do with the American Eagle coins.
I’m bored with many of the designs that the U.S. Mint has produced while ignoring the best efforts of the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts to tell them otherwise.
I’m bored with what is coming out of the U.S. Mint and looking at the interesting collector coins coming out of other mints who are being more innovative with their designs. Where the U.S. Mint has produced one ultra-high relief coin, the Royal Canadian Mint has three high-relief coin designs for 2011.
I’m bored with the themes of the coins coming out of the U.S. Mint. While the Medal of Honor Commemorative is a worthy coin and one of the few good designs to come out of the U.S. Mint, but I am fascinated by what some of the other mints are doing. The Mongolia 2011 500 Tugrog Endangered Wildlife silver commemorative features the Ural Owl struck in high relief with an antique finish and Swarovski Crystal Eyes. This is part of the same series that produced the 2007 Wolverine coin that was named the 2009 Coin of the Year. It also was a high relief coin with an antique finish and Swarovski Crystal eyes. We have great artists in the United States, why can’t the U.S. Mint create coins like this?
Why can’t the U.S. Mint celebrate the history of auto making in the United States the way Tuvalu celebrates Classic Sports Cars or great American motorcycles the same way Somalia did in 2007?
My late mother was a fan of impressionism. She could tell you anything about the artists and the art of that era. One day, I showed here the 2007 Niue Island Van Gogh rectangular silver dollars and thought the design was one of the neatest things she saw. Every time I see on online I am reminded of her interest in a coin when she was not a coin collector. Could we interest others artists if the U.S. Mint created coins honoring American artists? Can you imagine what could be done with Georgia O'Keeffe’s flowers, Andy Warhol’s pop art, or even Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass designs? These could become popular collectibles and generate significant seignorage for the U.S. Mint.
The reason why the U.S. Mint is behind the rest of the world is because of congress. Congress has taken its power to coin money and has clutched it in such a pedantic manner that it has turned the U.S. Mint into a tired looking organization that is falling behind the rest of the world. Although as a factory for circulating coin, the U.S. Mint produces more coins than any other world mint, they are losing the potential seignorage and artistic prestige to other mints that are producing interesting coins that people want to collect.
There is nothing in the constitution that says the U.S. Mint has to be structured the way it is. All we have is 219 years of “this is the way we wrote the law” that binds the United States to a system that is questioned every few years.
One idea is the model an independent U.S. Mint after the operating model of other world mints. One example that could be adopted is to model a new public corporation after the Royal Canadian Mint. While the RCM is required to produce circulating coinage for the Bank of Canada, they have a little more freedom to produce a portfolio of non-circulating legal tender coins that appears to have a broad appeal. Since many of these NCLT coins are made of precious metals, collectors and investors have been purchasing the RCM’s coins as investments.
As a public corporation, the U.S. Mint would continue to be required to supply circulating coins to the Federal Reserve, maintain the American Eagle Bullion program, and the current commemorative program. As a public corporation, they could add support for additional NCLT coins coins that could compete with other world mints to sell coins with great designs.
I realize that this is a very high-level idea of a new future for the U.S. Mint that requires additional details but it would be a waste of time to pursue this further. Given the personalities in congress who would have to approve such a measure, the chance of this happening is the same as the chance of ending the printing of the one-dollar note.
4 comments:
1. Congress's right to coin money and set its value is an enumerated power (Art 1. Sec. 8). However, in 1800 and 1802, Republicans in the Senate sought to close the US Mint as a burden on the Treasury. Congress could contract for coins, as surely as it contracts for armaments or pencils.
2. The market is always right. We sell what others want to buy. The popularity of US Mint issues speaks for itself. Americans love shallow displays of patriotism with dead pilgrims and fruited plains.
3. You are free to buy what you want. The markets respond to the subjectivity of values. Myself, I am not a big collector, but I have gone from ancient Greeks, to merchant tokens, to stock certificates as I pursued the artifacts of commerce. For almost 40 years now, private mints have issued a huge array of silver art bars and rounds celebrating everything from pioneers and Indians to space flight and world peace.
4. I understand and appreciate your jeremiad. I share your anguish. If I ran the Mint... but I do not.
I concur. My only worry is that it would turn into gimmicks or that we would experience collector fatigue. After all, I think almost all coin collectors are sick of the ginormous numbers of state/park quarters. I know that's not the type of thing you're talking about, but if you extend it to, say, high-relief versions of important native food crops in America, you're going to experience fatigue after the 10th edition (though off the top of my head I can think of only five key ones - corn, potatoes, beans, peanuts, cotton - but I'm sure I'm missing many). It could be an itneresting series, like have George Washington Carver on the obverse and a peanut plant emplaced on some "label" of a peanut product on the reverse, but I think it would get overly expensive and people would lose interest. That's one thing I did like about the RCM dinosaur coin series: It was limited to 4 years (though they struck a second one the 4th year because they realized they were making, well, a mint on them). So something like that would need to be taken into account.
Personally, I would like to see more historical coin themes. I would love to see a series of great events that occur in each state. Or great events that occurred during each president's term of office. I am not a fan of celebrating nature on coins per se, although the ATB program on regular sized quarters is somewhat interesting.
PMs are big now due to the current economic conditions, so it might be a good time to collect old clad coins. To me, the 5 oz ATBs are a gimmick.
I never really liked the state quarters. Everyone went crazy for them when they first came out. I think my sister still has little plastic bags full of them. I actually got a quarter in my change the other day and when I flipped it over - it was one of the colorized painted state collectable quarters - just weird.
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