Did you see the news about Italian authorities seizing roughly $6 trillion in fake Treasury bonds in Switzerland?

Even in this day and age of large numbers, such as our $3.8 trillion federal budgets and a $15 trillion national debt, you have to wonder what the forgers of these securities were thinking.

We were not told how good these fake bonds are, only that they were stored in three large trunks at a Swiss trust company.

But does anybody believe that such a sum can be obtained even if the bonds were so good that the famous bankers of Switzerland are fooled?

One iron rule of counterfeiting is that to successfully pass something, you just can’t afford to call attention to yourself.

I think $6 trillion would put anyone in the spotlight even if they wore dark glasses and turned up the collar on their overcoat.

Someone might even place a call to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner about such a sum. It is six times the total of all of the U.S. paper currency in circulation.

Imagine trying to walk out of a bank lobby with that much cash stuffed in your pockets.

Our poor old chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Ben Bernanke, can’t even spend 10 percent of that sum over the course of eight or nine months without being noticed.

They are still talking about his $600 billion of QE2, or the second round of quantitative easing that ended last June.

What chance do the poor counterfeiters have trying to pass 10 times that amount?

We can’t have them making Bernanke look like a piker, now can we?

Did you remember where you were 50 years ago yesterday when astronaut John Glenn blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in Friendship 7 to become the first American to orbit the earth?

Five decades is a long time to remember an event, but I happen to be someone who can remember it.

Why?

My grade school considered the event so important that we kids were invited to view it on televisions placed in various locations around the school.

The set I watched the blast-off on was in the hallway outside my classroom.

It was the only time while I was in school that an event from the space program caused us to stop what we were doing.

There were many events that characterize the decade of the 1960s, but it seems to me the space program gets short shrift.

Sure, the Apollo 11 moon landing was celebrated on the reverse of first the Eisenhower dollar starting in 1971 and then the Anthony dollar in 1979, but there is nothing else.

I editorialized in the 1980s that the space shuttle should be on a commemorative.

The response from Mint Director Donna Pope was that a space shuttle on a coin would soon look old-fashioned.

Well, yes it will someday. That’s precisely the point. Milestones of history are reminders of what came before us.

The space program is a series of events worthy of commemoration. That we as a nation have done little to mark our progress with silver and gold coins will look to be strange to future generations.

Legislation in Congress that calls for a March of Dimes commemorative silver dollar has some collectors slapping their foreheads.

To them, the obvious commemorative vehicle to commemorate the national charity that helped to wipe out polio is the coin that is in the name: the dime.

It seems logical.

But if Congress did authorize such a coin, would collectors be friendly to it?

I would like to believe that they would, but my gut tells me there might be problems. The negative scenario is they would react to it like collectors did to uncirculated two-roll Lincoln cent sets that the Mint offered to get the 2009 commemorative cent designs into collector hands and again in 2010 to get the new Union Shield design to them.

Instead of looking at it as paying roughly 14 cent apiece for each of the cents offered, collectors figured two rolls at $8.95 plus the $4.95 handling charge for a total of $13.90 was price gouging.  Paying $12.90 for $1 face value in coins was considered too much.

That logic might easily be applied to a March of Dimes dime.

The silver value would be roughly 24 times face value, or $2.40 at present silver bullion prices, but the Mint would not be able to cover its costs if it essentially sold the coin for double silver value.

First off, there would be the surcharge that is placed on every commemorative coin to cover. How much would it be?

If the congressional sponsors set it low, there is no way it could raise much money unless multiple millions are sold.

If it were, say, $2 a coin and collectors went crazy and bought 2 million of them, it would raise $4 million. Would that potentially satisfy the sponsors?

Also, the Mint needs to make a little something.

At the current price of the Infantry Soldier uncirculated dollar, the Mint is charging $18.95 over silver value and $10 of that is the surcharge. Therefore, the Mint is working on roughly an $8.95 margin for each coin to cover packaging and all the costs of striking.

Would it need as much for a dime?

Say the Mint could shave it to $6 per coin.

We would then have a coin with $2.40 in silver in it, $2 in surcharge applied to it and $6 in Mint costs, or $10.40 per coin. At $4.95 for shipping and handling, the collector who only wanted one coin for his collection would pay $15.35 in the best possible case.

Who will go for that deal?

Since the United States ended the active circulation of paper money in denominations of $500 and higher in 1969, I have wondered from time to time what it was like to use them.

What exactly could you use them for?

In 1969 I earned about $10 a week from my paper route. A $500 bill would have taken virtually all my earnings for a year.

Needless to say, my thoughts on this topic remained simply idle fantasy.

Until the World Money Fair in Berlin.

At the Krause booth someone actually wanted to subscribe to World Coin News and tendered a 500-euro note as payment.

On that day, such a note was worth about $655. I had never seen anything but a photograph of this top euro denomination.

So, among the three of us at the booth we did not have change for such a large bill, so we had to decline the note with apologies.

Now I know what such a large denomination introduced in day-to-day life does to me.

It’s disruptive.

Also, I would hate to lose it if I had somehow been able to accept it and make change.

It is well known that the German economy is more cash based for ordinary transactions, but I suspect even ordinary Germans don’t regularly make change for a 500-euro note.

So much for my 43 years of idle speculation about large denominations. If they existed in the United States, they would only make my life more difficult as the 500-euro note did in Berlin.

When the 2012 Infantry Soldier silver dollar commemorative goes on sale tomorrow at the U.S. Mint’s website, the price of both the proof and the uncirculated pieces will be below $50.

The proof has an introductory price of $49.95 and the uncirculated is $44.95.

Are those prices low enough to begin a revival in demand for American commemorative coins?

Every collector is going to make the same bullion calculation that I make and consider the fact that each coin contains $26 in silver at the present price of bullion, leaving a mark-up of $$23.95 for the proof and $18.95 for the uncirculated.

I don’t see that generating much enthusiasm.

How about the mintage?

The ceiling set for this program is just 350,000 coins, down from the 500,000 level from last year.

That seems like a significant cut until we look at the actual sales numbers of the two 2011 silver dollar coins, which did not reach 200,000 pieces.

The Army dollar’s proof and uncirculated sales numbers combined for a total of 163,346 and the Medal of Honor equivalent number is 157,619.

That means this year’s ceiling will likely have little impact on collector ordering behavior.

How about the theme?

The infantry soldier.

I don’t think anybody will knock the theme, but on the other hand, it takes something of a mental fizz in the minds of collectors to want to add something to their collections. Boy Scouts and Lincoln are examples of recent issues that did generate such a fizz.

I don’t see much prospect for that here.

What this all boils down to is demand for this commemorative dollar will come from the hardy collectors who year in and year out want to add the new commemorative issues to their growing sets of silver dollar commemoratives.

The Mint and the organizations that benefit from the $10 surcharge placed on each coin will owe these collectors a big thank-you.

Perhaps a future commemorative silver dollar should take as its theme the average collector.

Here we are in the middle of the second month of 2012. For Iola, hints of spring are just around the corner. In fact, tomorrow it might be 40 degrees here. At the moment, it is snowing lightly.

No question that by April things will be starting to green up around here.

What happens to numismatics if the hints of spring in the American economy actually blossom into a new growth season?

What if unemployment continues to decline? What if economic growth accelerates? What if price increases stay tame?

One thing for sure is that readers of Numismatic News will relax and feel more at liberty to spend money on their collections.

An awful lot of attention (and spending) has been paid to bullion and bullion coins in the last five years. That improves dealer cash flow, but it is distracting for someone trying to put together a set of Lincoln cents, or even Morgan dollars.

After all, how do you justify it to a noncollecting spouse that an XF or AU 1909-S VDB cent or 1893-S Morgan dollar is a good buy if you are worried about being laid off, paying the mortgage, or you worry that inflation will get out of hand and you might need the funds for living expenses?

Collectors, too, were hedging bets and buying silver and gold bullion coins. While it is smart to have insurance against an unknown future, it can get kind of boring if that is all you think about.

It is much more fun to finish sets and start new ones.

So what happens to this aspect of numismatics if 2012 turns into a tolerably improving year?

We just might see the collector impulse taking full charge again. That would be a treat to see.

While I was in Germany I had an email from someone who wrote that there appeared to be a mistake in the Coin Market  table of gold, silver and platinum Eagle prices. It appears monthly in the first issue of each month in Numismatic News.

I wrote back that I would take a look at it when I returned to the United States.

Sure enough, there is a duplicate listing for the 2011-W uncirculated silver American Eagle that the Mint sells directly to collectors.

The duplicate listing appeared in the Feb. 7 issue. It will be eliminated for the next monthly appearance in the March 6 issue..

I have always said that readers are the best proof readers. Any errors are quickly spotted and reported to me.

That’s the way it should be.

If only I could be perfect and simply not make mistakes. Well, that isn’t going to happen. I will never earn an MS-70 grade.

If only I could catch all of my mistakes and those of other writers before they make it into print. Well, that is impossible as well.

The best we can hope for is an ongoing dialogue. I hope mistakes are kept to a minimum, but when they happen, let me know.

And if you don’t spot any mistakes this week, let me know what you are thinking anyway.

There are sound economic reasons to advocate the adoption of a gold or precious metal monetary standard for the United States.

However, the case is gravely weakened if it gets mixed up with tax fraud.

I read a story yesterday on boston.com http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-09/news/31042755_1_silver-coins-paper-dollars-silver-dollars about someone who has petitioned Andover, Mass., to consider a proposal at a town meeting in April that would involve paying its employees partly in silver American Eagles if the employees agree.

So, far no problem.

However, the rest of the proposal is that the town would have to withhold income taxes only on the $1 face value of the coins, not the $35 actual value.

The article goes on to point out that the Internal Revenue Service takes a dim view of such a proposal and has won cases in court to enforce the current tax law.

While advocates of a gold standard cannot control the actions of everybody else, it does not help the case to see it mixed up with mischief in this way.

With advocacy of something new, like a gold standard, which almost no one now living remembers, the burden of proof weighs more heavily on its supporters rather than on upholders of the status quo to explain its advantages thoroughly and make it clear that this is not some trickster’s dream system to take advantage of the majority of people who are not familiar with how the standard worked before it was abandoned in 1933.

Even during the gold standard era, people had to pay income tax after it was adopted.

Do collectors respond better to new coin issues whose face value is below bullion value, or whose face value is above bullion value?

Around the world it is a debatable point.

Canada has been hitting home runs with its new $20 coins for $20 series. The third one featuring a polar bear is now on sale.

Buyers pay face value and receive a slightly larger than quarter-sized coin that contains a quarter ounce of silver.

With silver at $34 an ounce, that works out to $8.50 in silver value. Silver would have to rise to $80 an ounce before it would exceed the $20 face value.

The Canadian dollar is presently even with the U.S. currency in foreign exchange markets.

The first issue sold out its 200,000 mintage in approximately one month. The second issue, which got my attention when I saw it advertised, sold out its 250,000 mintage in a similar period of time. I expect the third issue with the polar bear will likewise reach the 250,000 maximum.

Though I very much liked the canoe design on the second piece and that is what caught my eye, I think the clincher for me in deciding to buy it was not the relationship between the silver value and the face value but the attractiveness of the $20 price point. I figured such a sum wouldn’t ruin my monthly budget and I was free to act on impulse (Yes, I do think this way).

My colleagues here in the office, Lisa Bellavin and Tom Michael felt the same way and I ordered three pieces for us.

Affordability is not something we collectors tend to put up front in our thinking, but at the end of the day, that is what matters most.

It is the peculiar nature of the World Money Fair that I attended last week in Berlin that I ran into people that I would more normally speak to at home.

One such conversation I had was with Tom Hallenbeck, president of the American Numismatic Association. He was attending his second Berlin event.

Unlike last year, this year the ANA had a booth and Ann Rahn and Kim Kiick were helping Hallenbeck fly the ANA flag in Europe.

When I asked Hallenbeck about his experience, he said, “It’s fascinating what they do here. How differently coin dealers work and how differently they do business than world mints.”

He thinks the summer ANA convention can do better catering to the needs of world mints. “I think we can do a lot better job,” he said.

Unlike the more casual American way of doing business at a coin show, Hallenbeck noted that the world mints set up their meetings well in advance of the event.

“It’s very hard to just walk up and meet somebody.” He said he was lucky at one booth. He happened by and was told by the dealer that it was the first time in two days that he had been there.

How do the Europeans view the ANA president, I asked?

“I’ve been treated superbly. I’ve been treated with German kindness,” he replied.

“Just being here a second year is opening doors for the ANA.”

Hallenbeck said it was his hope to make the summer ANA convention live up to its name of World’s Fair of Money.

That will require some rethinking.

Whereas security and open lines of sight across the bourse floor are the primary considerations when setting up an American bourse, Hallenbeck said mints have other ideas of what they want.

“They like the idea of big set-up booths,” Hallenbeck explained. They stand out, but they also make any clean line of sight for security impossible.

He mentioned the Paris Mint. He said they would attend the ANA convention “only if they can build something that looks like Paris.”

Overall, Hallenbeck said, the mints “do want an American trade show.”

Hallenbeck is determined to help them get it.

But learning was not a one-way street.

Hallenbeck noted that the mints he talked to seemed “stunned at the number of ANA members.” They did not know that ANA had a large staff providing many programs to American collectors through its museum, library, monthly publication and club outreach.

Now that I am home, I can watch to see how the lessons of Berlin will be applied by the ANA and the world’s mints. And get some sleep.