Don’t get carried away

Sometimes it pays simply to wait as events unfold. The news this morning is that Lehman Brothers, a large Wall Street investment bank, is filing for bankruptcy.

Gold is up a bit on the news. The dollar is down a bit. The stock market is expected to get hammered.

What will happen in the coin market?

There are a lot of cross currents. If the economy continues to slide into recession, collectors who have lost their jobs or who are fearful of losing their jobs likely would cut back.

Sounds logical.

The paradox is that a golden age of coin collecting was during the Great Depression when unemployment reached a high of 25 percent of the work force. People gravitated toward it because it was a cheap form of entertainment and they viewed putting coins in die-punched pieces of cardboard as a means of saving money, with the added element of lottery thrown in if they found one of the scarcer dates.

Today seems to be one of those days where for most of us in the numismatic hobby it simply pays to stand back and wait. Why jump to conclusions? I have been a collector for 45 years. I don’t intend to quit. I imagine most collectors feel the same way.