Gold Coins in USA

Rob Klein bi442 at lafn.org
Fri Apr 13 15:41:35 CEST 2001


Regarding my statement about the existence of gold coins in ordinary
peoples' possession:
That statement was only intended to show that they were not nearly as rare
as 10000 Dollar bills.  I have never known anyone who has even SEEN one of
the latter.  The gold coins I spoke of were keepsakes sometimes kept on
their persons (usually adult males only), or often kept in a drawer in
their house, and the others kept in a jar on a shelf (also keepsakes), or a
collector's coin book.  I am sure that as a visitor (only)to entrepeneurial
(shopkeepers) Jewish middle class families,  and meeting only their friends
and a few neighbours, I did not see an accurate sampling of the American
public.  However, i did not mean to imply that EVERY or MOST families in
USA had gold coins in their possession - only that they were not rare as
Hens' Teeth. None of these people freely spent these coins in circulation
(as by post World War II) these coins were already worth more than their
official minted coin denominational value, as collector's pieces.  I
suspect that may have been true from the 1930s.  

I did not mean to imply that a large, or even significant percentage of
circulated coins in USA were gold.  I suspect that such a scenario NEVER
was true (even in the 1800s heydey of USA gold coins).  

I believe that Scrooge would have had an admixture of silver, copper and
coloured coins, with silver forming the majority and the others as small
amounts.  Scrooge was so rich that he would have had many, many gold coins,
as they stored much value (and I think he preferred coins to bills).  But,
the bulk of his coins in his money bin should be coloured silver.  In the
countries that started colouring them gold from the start, they should
continue to do so, so as to keep the continuity.  I grew up seeing BOTH
versions, and had NO problem adjusting to it.   

Cheers,  Rob Klein

  



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