Coins and their valuable metal contents

Still, I am grateful these little coins are at least made of metal, not plastic. Every little bit helps the mines. Will the loonie survive? Well, here’s my thought on that matter.

A hundred or so years ago, in northeast North America, the old English bird-name of loon was applied to the plentiful Great Northern Diver, Colymbus glacialis. This English word for loon, lun, for a bird, dates from 1634.

Before the invention of percussion guns, it was almost impossible to shoot this bird because it dived instantaneously on seeing the flash of the ignited gunpowder in the pan of the old flintlock. What a survivor.

It followed that a person holding impractical views was called a “loon hunter.” Going loon hunting carried the same sense as our “on a wild goose chase.”

In contrast to the U.K. and Canadian acceptance of these coins, the American public has vigorously rejected both the Susan B. Anthony one-dollar cupro-nickel coin and the two-dollar coin. Fortunately, our gold Maple Leafs and silver collector coins have been a big success in the United States and elsewhere.

It is sobering to recall the pound sterling used to be one pound weight of almost pure silver, currently worth about $85(C), and the English penny was for hundreds of years made of solid silver, now worth as metal about 35 cents .

Nowadays, silver is obviously far too expensive for circulating coins. We have to go back to the early 1960s for Canadian dimes and quarters made of 80% silver and the American versions containing 90% silver.

If you had kept a 1940 paper U.S. one-dollar bill and 10 U.S. silver dimes, they would now have vastly different purchasing powers. The 10 dimes would now be worth around $3(US), or 300 cents, but the paper dollar would buy you 100 cents in goods.

Another way of looking at metals as real money is to consider that in 1965, one troy ounce of gold would buy 11.5 hours of mine labor, but by 1985 it bought 33 hours.

You see, no government can change the reality that silver and gold metal need no one’s signature to make them valuable. A government can deprive its citizens of gold for a period, as was done in the U.S.S.R., and the United States (1934-75), but it cannot, in the long term control the world price for gold or silver, causing the governments much frustration.

Silver and gold bullion cannot be adequately counterfeited like paper money and neither can they undergo an artificially created increase, as is done with printing presses.

Neither gold nor silver has to be in coin form to be money. As mentioned, the pound has a weight of silver. The original shekel of the Middle East was a unit of weight of standard quality silver, possibly about 0.27 troy oz.

There are very few practical day- to-day things we have in common with those of so long ago but mining and trading silver is certainly one of them. Trading loonies will not last as long. T. P. (Tom) Mohide, a former president of the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, served as a director of mining resources with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources prior to his retirement in 1986.

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