You won't make a mint buying coins this way
U.S. presidential coin offer really doesn't add up
What if I offered to sell you an ordinary quarter for 60 cents? You'd tell me to . . . well, I can't print what you'd probably tell me to do.
So what are we to make of a company called World Reserve Monetary Exchange, which recently took out full-page ads in this paper and elsewhere offering rolls of 50 $1 coins for $124? That's about $2.50 for each $1 coin.
The ads, which could easily have been mistaken at first glance for news stories, are titled "Going, Going, Gone," and say that "free coins are being handed out" to anyone calling within 72 hours to order "never-before-seen Ballistic Rolls of the U.S. Government's dazzling new Presidential Dollar Coins."
"The U.S. Gov't barely got started minting these new coins and by law were required to stop production forever," the ads breathlessly (and ungrammatically) states. "There will never be any more."
Well, yeah. But that's not because a law was passed suddenly cutting off production. It's because the U.S. Mint makes millions of coins honoring each president and then moves on to other presidents.
"We're minting to demand," says Michael White, a Mint spokesman. As such, he says about 340 million George Washington coins were minted last year, followed by 224 million John Adams coins, 203 million Thomas Jeffersons, 172 million James Madisons and 124 million James Monroes.
At least 115 million John Quincy Adams coins are being introduced this month, with four additional presidents coming each year all the way up to Gerald Ford in 2016. (A president has to be dead at least two years before being put on a coin.)
So are these coins worth more than the $1 they represent?
"You can get them for face value at the bank," White says. "We're not marketing them as investment coins."
In other words, a roll of 50 presidential dollars is worth $50. And with hundreds of millions of the coins in circulation, it's a pretty safe bet that, a decade from now, they'll be worth, well, about $50.
"The mintage levels of these things are rather high," observes Jay Beeton, a spokesman for the American Numismatic Assn., the country's largest organization of coin collectors. "Right there it impacts their long-term value."
That's not the impression the World Reserve Monetary Exchange conveys, though. Its ads point out that 1973 coins commemorating Dwight Eisenhower "have already increased in value by an astonishing 1,200%."
