Posted 09/17/2022 12:01 am
The thing is, Sel, 2023-dated coins with the Queen's portrait already exist - they were struck months ago, and they were striking them right up to the announcement of the queen's death. The mints - by which I mean all the major Mints in the Commonwealth i.e. Royal Mint, RCM, RAM, Perth and probably a few others - have been striking 2023-dated coins featuring her portrait since July, if not earlier. This has been standard practice at the Mints for years; it's purely a marketing tactic, to make sure 2023 coins are on the shelves of dealers by Christmas. Some of these 2023 coins have already been sold and shipped; the Year of the Tiger ones are particularly noteworthy in having already been issued and are already claiming significant premiums on the secondary market.The Mints will most likely destroy any such coins still in stock and unsold and cancel any preorders that may have been made, but there's nothing they can do about the coins already shipped.
And yes, I think any 2023-dated QEII coins that escaped will indeed see a price spike. They might even be marketed as "mint errors", even though the only "mint error" is corporate greed and impatience. Whether that price spike is maintained into higher value items in the future, it's hard to say - this is the first time a monarch has died since the mints went all corporatized and started striking coins half a year in advance of the purported date, so there's no past data to work from. For me, the big unknown, for the Year of the Tiger coins particularly, is the response from the Asian markets to a "lucky coin" with a dead person on it. It's possible such coins would be shunned as unlucky, in which case I suspect the price spike will be short-lived.
I have long predicted this predicament would arise, if a monarch should happen to pass away towards the end of a calendar year. Now its finally happened, so I guess my word to the Mints is, "I told you so". Personally, I'd like to see the mints be required to adopt a French-Mint-style policy: all coins must have the actual year of striking on them, no pre-dated or ante-dated coins allowed. And if that means coin collectors don't get next years mint sets as Christmas presents, so be it.
And yes, I think any 2023-dated QEII coins that escaped will indeed see a price spike. They might even be marketed as "mint errors", even though the only "mint error" is corporate greed and impatience. Whether that price spike is maintained into higher value items in the future, it's hard to say - this is the first time a monarch has died since the mints went all corporatized and started striking coins half a year in advance of the purported date, so there's no past data to work from. For me, the big unknown, for the Year of the Tiger coins particularly, is the response from the Asian markets to a "lucky coin" with a dead person on it. It's possible such coins would be shunned as unlucky, in which case I suspect the price spike will be short-lived.
I have long predicted this predicament would arise, if a monarch should happen to pass away towards the end of a calendar year. Now its finally happened, so I guess my word to the Mints is, "I told you so". Personally, I'd like to see the mints be required to adopt a French-Mint-style policy: all coins must have the actual year of striking on them, no pre-dated or ante-dated coins allowed. And if that means coin collectors don't get next years mint sets as Christmas presents, so be it.
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
