Letters to the Editor: From the June 24, 2025 issue of Numismatic News
From pennies to Papal coins, gold to gridiron, readers weigh in with passion, perspective, and plenty of numismatic heart.
My 1-Cent Worth
The U.S. one-cent coin will be eliminated in 2026. This represents the loss of tradition, reputation, and superiority of the U.S. economic system.
The one-cent coin has remained despite other countries eliminating their lowest value coin. Some have even eliminated their five-cent coin as well, yielding to inflation.
The U.S. one-cent represented:
American tradition (Benjamin Franklin: “A penny saved is a penny earned.”).
Reputation (Abraham Lincoln, who saved the country from dividing and failing).
Economic stability (The fight against inflation by retaining the original coin denomination that most early Americans depended on for their daily expenses.).
Nostalgia: The one-cent coin was most likely the first “monetary” item that every U.S. child touched. It evokes memory, fondness, and a belief in America.
The elimination of the one-cent coin is a short-sighted maneuver of the Treasury Department. “The one-cent coin costs four cents to make!” is the outcry. Never mind that the average lifespan of a one-cent coin is 30 years. Coins dated over 60 years ago can still be found in daily circulation.
This is akin to saying, “roofs are extremely expensive - and they leak! We ought to eliminate roofs. There is no value in the current roof.” A very shallow point of view.
That is to say, “There is no value in Tradition, Reputation, Economic Stability, or Nostalgia.”
The result will be immediate inflation. Shop owners are already calculating how they can raise the price of every item they sell to “the next five-cent level.”
Save a place in your heart for “the honorable penny.”
Name and address withheld
Buying Gold
Gold represents purchasing power. When one owns the metal, one knows that it can easily be exchanged for goods and services via dollars.
Gold is a non-producing asset. It does not create or destroy wealth. It preserves existing wealth. Gold will never be worthless nor make anyone richer than the amount of the metal owned.
How much gold one buys should be a function of how much wealth one wants or needs to preserve.
Investors are often obsessed with the spot price. They become so worried about paying too much that they may hold back on purchases. A better strategy is to assess personal need and make acquisitions when one has the resources to comfortably do so.
The benefit of being a collector versus an investor is that one will buy gold coins when a desired piece becomes available, regardless of the spot price. A purchase may happen at any time based on collecting desire rather than investment worry. For a collector, any time may be the right time.
Gold has always seemed expensive. But the acquisition of a beautiful coin always alleviates the pain caused by the high spot price.
Collectors will not stop buying gold coins but may buy fewer due to affordability. If spot drops, more gold coins may become affordable. But collectors do not like to wait when an opportunity appears.
Bruce R Frohman, Modesto, Calif.
A Great Issue
Found all sorts of subjects – sede vacante, size, sports, steel, cents, and so on – to dig my teeth into in your May issue! And a nice range of ‘tones’ too, if you will – from Benvenuto’s appropriately respectful treatment [of the Papal pieces] to Lo Presti’s teasing type of suspense, along with a few laugh-out-loud remarks [gold ‘great and small’]!
I would like only to add to Mattimiro’s account [sports] a word about the neat array of sports tokens and medals out there; these include ‘season schedule’ tokens of the ’72 Dolphins – ‘perfection’ not seen prior/since the high-school awards of future Olympians and Hall-of-Famers, and silver medals depicting famous athletes who passed away young and tragically or who would later become subjects of scandal!
For the collector of what philatelists call “topicals,” exonumia makes a singular, significant, and satisfying contribution! Thank you for a consistently informative and entertaining publication!!
Roy Lush, Lantana, Fla.
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