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Posted Today 6H 59M ago
Demand is an entire half of the famous "supply and demand" equation that determines the price of an object. In other words, it literally does not matter if something actually really and truly is "rare", it won't be valuable if nobody wants it.
Most demand for a specific country's coin series is generated domestically, from collectors within that country. So for a country to have "high value" coins, there need to be a lot of collectors in that country that want to collect their own coins. If the number of collectors in that country is very small, then there simply won't be any demand for those coins, either in that country or elsewhere, and the prices will be low, no matter how low the mintages or how high the quality of the artwork.
It's not just the absolute size of the country that determines that baseline demand level, but also the "collecting culture" of that country. It's widely known that coin collecting is simply more popular in some countries than in others, and it surprisingly has little to do with the relative wealth of that country. Canada and the USA both have very high participation levels - the percentage of the population that collects coins is much higher in North America than it is pretty much anywhere else. The demand difference between Canada and the US is driven purely by the fact that Canada is much smaller in population than the US.
For another example, compare the two Western European economic superpowers, France and Germany. Both roughly the same size, both wealthy countries with rich numismatic histories, both having very proud and parochial peoples interested in their own national history and identity, and both countries joined the euro at exactly the same time. Yet coin collecting is far more popular in Germany than it is in France. Why? It boils down to culture. And I think that cultural difference can be traced back to the divergence in their histories in the 1700s: Germany stayed aristocratic, while France underwent a populist revolution that saw much of the aristocracy be killed or exiled. So in Germany we saw the rise of the mindset that if you were wealthy enough to have spare money, you should do what the aristocracy does and collect coins. Meanwhile in France, coin collecting became something seen as a decadent luxury, a habit of the evil nobility, and not something to be culturally sought after. Although the aristocracy is now long gone in both countries, the legacy of that attitude shift is still seen today.
Most demand for a specific country's coin series is generated domestically, from collectors within that country. So for a country to have "high value" coins, there need to be a lot of collectors in that country that want to collect their own coins. If the number of collectors in that country is very small, then there simply won't be any demand for those coins, either in that country or elsewhere, and the prices will be low, no matter how low the mintages or how high the quality of the artwork.
It's not just the absolute size of the country that determines that baseline demand level, but also the "collecting culture" of that country. It's widely known that coin collecting is simply more popular in some countries than in others, and it surprisingly has little to do with the relative wealth of that country. Canada and the USA both have very high participation levels - the percentage of the population that collects coins is much higher in North America than it is pretty much anywhere else. The demand difference between Canada and the US is driven purely by the fact that Canada is much smaller in population than the US.
For another example, compare the two Western European economic superpowers, France and Germany. Both roughly the same size, both wealthy countries with rich numismatic histories, both having very proud and parochial peoples interested in their own national history and identity, and both countries joined the euro at exactly the same time. Yet coin collecting is far more popular in Germany than it is in France. Why? It boils down to culture. And I think that cultural difference can be traced back to the divergence in their histories in the 1700s: Germany stayed aristocratic, while France underwent a populist revolution that saw much of the aristocracy be killed or exiled. So in Germany we saw the rise of the mindset that if you were wealthy enough to have spare money, you should do what the aristocracy does and collect coins. Meanwhile in France, coin collecting became something seen as a decadent luxury, a habit of the evil nobility, and not something to be culturally sought after. Although the aristocracy is now long gone in both countries, the legacy of that attitude shift is still seen today.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
