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The Obama Coins Rip-Off

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By Susan Headley, About.com Guide to Coins
Tuesday November 11, 2008

With the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency, there has been an outpouring of strong emotions among many Americans the likes of which we haven't seen in relation to a U.S. president since John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Coin collectors are well aware of the important change to U.S. coinage that occurred as a result of the strong emotional response to Kennedy's death. The Franklin Half Dollar, which had only been in circulation for 16 years, was quickly replaced by the Kennedy Half. Normally, a coin design was supposed to have been in use for at least 25 years before being replaced, but due to the strong public sentiment for Kennedy, the new Half Dollar was released into circulation within 3 months of the assassination! The 1964 Kennedy Halves were widely hoarded as mementos, and public demand was so strong that more than 429,000,000 of them were struck. This was a gigantic mintage for half dollars, which usually saw mintages well below 10% of this number.

Fast-forward to 2008 and we have the election of Obama, the first U.S. President with African-American roots, a man who has a strong appeal to Americans of all racial backgrounds. Emotional feelings for Obama are running high, and many people who have no knowledge of coin collecting and what makes a coin valuable are buying coins for the first time. They are buying coins that commemorate Obama's success, and the slick TV shopping show marketers are taking full advantage of this emotional response and the naivete of non-collectors to sell them these numismatically worthless coins. The coins I am talking about are the colorized State Quarters and Presidential Dollars that are being sold for ridiculous prices. These marketers are defacing U.S. coins by applying color portraits of Obama, and then selling them to you at 15 to 60 times face value. My regular readers know that I have a strong dislike for coins with mutilated surfaces, especially when someone is selling them as investments. I had originally done a standard consumer advocate-type warning article about the Obama coins, until Scott Travers, the author of my all-time favorite coin collecting book, The Coin Collector's Survival Manual, saw my article and made me aware of a frightening fact. It seems that some people don't just buy 2 or 3 of these coins as keepsakes, they buy 300 to 500 of them as serious "investments!"

Learn more about the various types of colorized Obama commemorative coins which are being sold, and read what Travers has to say about their future growth potential as a collectible in my article about the Obama coins rip-off. My article also tells you which commemorative Obama coin is the only one that was officially commissioned by the Democratic Party.

Source: http://coins.about.com/b/2008/11/11/the-obama-coins-rip-off.htm