Gradual Grade Inflation Of Slabbed Coins

In case you missed it, over the last four decades there has been a "grade migration" upward for ALL COINS. Much of this CAUSED by the "evolving" standards of the TPGS's.

Good points. But for coins that are problem-free, expensive, high MS coins, it does seem that the ability to crack out and resubmit coins to try for a higher grade will tend to raise the grades for those coins over time. Guess that's another reason to buy the coin, not the slab.

The number of unslabbed coins of a reasonable quality such as to deserve slabbing is finite (decreasing as some are unfortunately lost through various events).

In order to keep the business going (or growing), you have to have a steady influx of transactions.

This is what drives the modern label fantasy. This one I understand but don't participate in. Creating markets through artificial scarcity and (imaginary) differentiation goes back 100s if not 1000s of years. Tulip bulbs come to mind.

And this is the force that also drives gradeflation: Resubmit it for a new fee, get a higher grade and magically the coin is 'worth' more. Everybody wins. Except the poor SOB who buys the now technically overgraded slab when the time comes to sell it.


One doesn't have to look far into our own history to see the results. There was a time that PCI was considered a legitimate slabbing company. Then they hopped on the market grading bandwagon and today are a joke. Even though the oldest PCI slabbed coins are actually pretty honestly graded.

What people miss is that when you cheapen the brand, you cheapen ALL uses of the brand. Especially if you (through plan or accident) erase the differentiations.

Gresham's law - bad money drives out good. Easily extends to bad anything drives out good.

Unfortunately, what will happen is that one (or both of them) will (eventually) announce a scientifically derived new grading scheme as a vast improvement on the old one.

The side effect will be (cue sad face) that all existing slabs (including our own) are obsolete and so must - to be current - be graded. As long as there is no easy mapping from old to new, it will allow them to hide the flaws.

They never have. And even the ANA standards are not the same as what they were back when the first edition of the book came out.

Already happening. I just bought a Peace dollar PCGS MS64+

CAC is making a business out of it.

[quote]Unfortunately, what will happen is that one (or both of them) will (eventually) announce a scientifically derived new grading scheme as a vast improvement on the old one.[/quote}
The tech to make a totally machine/computer graded coin system was available in the mid 90s at least. The scanning machine in a quality control department of a plastics plant I was in for awhile had a totally automated machine that you pout a part on and it made a scan/assessment down to thousands of an inch.

I believe it was in a thread on this forum I read PCGS poured (I think the figure) was over 100K into developing a system - then is suddenly just stopped.

I theorize that since the tech was available 20 years ago, they looked ahead and saw exactly what is quoted above as a way of keeping themselves in business a good long time into the future.

And if you think about it, even the facial recognition software in a lot of people's phones adds to showing the computer graded system is more than viable now.

The human element, though, will still be in place though as it will still be a human who decides what level of accuracy the machine will use (we don;t need thousandths of an inch with coins). But... it will also guarantee a whole new generation of collectors can also have be guaranteed to want their services, b/c the TPGs will always be able to claim (after everything has been re-reslabbed from the initial compu-grade system), that their level of accuracy has been increased and "how can you sleep without knowing the TRUE grade of you coin?"

The coins are not the issue. The money they make is - the TPGS have a good future in front of them as long as they can keep convincing people that every gimmick TPGs come up with is essential. IMO, when they emerged, it was b/c they had found a way to make it sound as if they were a necessary part of the hobby, and they keep "gimmicking" their way along.

P.T. Barnum was dead on. And we all fall for it at some time in our lives. It is human nature.