There are also two different, though related, forces at work. The US Treasury, which authorizes the coinage issue and places the coinage orders with the Mint, "wants" people to hoard the coins - though it is more a case of "increasing public savings" rather than some kind of anti-inflation measure. Making more coins actually increases inflation, since it increases the supply of money. Treasury also receives all the profits (seigniorage) from every single quarter they make, so the more quarters that need making, the better the profits.
The Mint, on the other hand, does not really care what happens to its coins once they are released into circulation - it made them and gave them to the Treasury, that's their job done. But the Mint would presumably prefer that coin collectors all obtained their coins from the Mint collector coin programmes, rather than from circulation, because the profits from collector coins are much higher - and more under the direct control of the Mint - than profits from seigniorage.
Relating it back to the topic at hand: there is no reason why the Mint would unilaterally reduce the quality of its coins, just to make a few crazy coin collectors happy. And Treasury would not order the Mint to deliberately make defective coins, for the reason I outlined earlier.
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Wasn't always that way. Some pretty cool "irregularities" came out of the various mints during the Classic era.
This is true... and, as I understand it, it took bribery and/or skullduggery on the part of certain coin dealers and collectors to obtain them. It was certainly never an official attempt by the Mint to deliberately release such oddities into general circulation.
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
Posted 05/29/2015 7:59 pm
