6/2/08 - because of the unusual situations with both the bullion markets and the USA dollar exchange rate everything (11/16/2008) you should consider ALL of my posted prices to be provisional.  There may be changes in any category.  This notice will be posted on a few other pages but not all.  But this is your official notice.

A. SELLING:
New (if the background of this page is a different color than last time you looked there is new stuff) - update 12/3/08
January pricelist
Last month's list
17,000 other things for sale
note on viewing pictures
site search

B. BUYING:
Buying
What's It Worth? - numismatic estate handling for live collectors & executors

C. SERVICES:
Attribution, authentication, grading, and appraisal services
Market research
Subscription
Website development and management services

D. INFORMATION
Information
Links - friends, colleagues

E. OPINIONS & NEWS

1/5/2008
1. I'VE RECEIVED the new KM 17th c. coins & pre-1961 paper catalogs.  IMO they are not significantly improved over previous eds.  Few price changes, but pricing by the catalog is probably a mistake in most cases, they're last year's prices at best, if they didn't change most of them after 5 years (17th c coins) what does that say?
   There appears to be some serious interest in getting an online catalog going.  If it starts to happen I'll let you know.  Meanwhile, I urge you to consider a future without Krause catalogs so that you will not be caught out "Huh?" if it happens.
   I am establishing a special email list for discussion of various aspects of this online catalog idea I'm playing with/working on.  Various questions to be discussed.  If you want to participate contrive to let me know please.
2. MICE PLAYING - is my take on the current Israeli activity.  Maybe they figure they wouldn't be able to pull it off after Jan. 20 when there's a man in the White House instead of a boy.  Not a good job.  But you want to see what the real Arab response is: Egypt is helping Israel, Syria is busy distilling rose attar or something.  No unity.  God is Great.
   I submit, however, that pushing a city toward Somalia status is kind of self-defeating.  There is a thought that if you treat a bad country as an infection and quarantine it you will contain the contagion but I think the metaphor does not hold in fact.  Anarchy spreads but tends to be overcome by regulated free enterprise, which everyone likes better.
   You with me on this thinking?  Niceness trumps meanness in the end.  That's what I see.
3. BETWEEN NOW and the middle of January will be the best time to contact your legislators and officials and tell them what you want them to do.  After that they will be getting to work and won't have time to deal with little you.  Go talk with them now, ask them what they think, get them to agree to consider what you say.  Then you can go back later and tell them that they said they'd do such and such, what's up.

12/3/2008
1. I think I'm starting to think that capital gains tax is, like, backwards.  The way it is it promotes speculation.  You want to get in, do your thing, get out in less than a year.  It should be exactly backwards from what it is.  An investment position that is liquidated in the shortest time should attract the highest tax.  The longer term it is the lower the tax.  Promotes long term growth.  Probably the tax should never be zero.  What do you think?
2. We are in a both-and time, not a this-that time.  It will be necessary to be global, in the Kerryesque sense to make sense of things.  A unitary view is insufficient and will fail.  Attempts to solve our problem in linear fashion will not succeed.
   What does this have to do with coins?  Well, Krause publications has seen fit to dispense with the services of both Colin Bruce and Randy Thern.  We all know that the main product they produce - the Standard Catalog series - has become badly messed up due to what appears to be fundamental data handling problems.  The absence of those two guys means that they are pretty much down to about 2 people in house who know coins like at all.  That means that they have lost the ability to improve their product.  Also, their main money comes from yearly sales of the 20th c. coin book & yearly updates are no longer necessary.  This means they are probably getting ready to abandon it.
   While I will not abandon the Krause group as long as they are the only game in town, I think that the need for a decent catalog for world coins is critical to my business and your benign obsession.  Preparations must be made for a future without Krause catalogs.  Because of cost considerations the successor catalog must be on line.
   I am working on a structure for such a catalog.  I need help from people with various levels of computer skill ranging from keypunch to systems integration.  No money yet of course, possible piece of the action, maybe some "free" coins.
   If you think you see what I think I see get in touch.  Time is of essence.

11/16/2008
My comments on the election will be in 2 sectors:
1. calm down
2. what next
Then I will briefly address "him."

1. I have within various parts of my "being" various views of history, which in some ways I "do for a living."  And it turned out that I did research in some, it seems, very specialized (= unpopular) fields, so that I find correspondences in events that other people do not notice.  Ask me for examples if you want to go there.
    But I will, in this presentation, keep those thoughts to myself.  Not out of coyness, but because I think I have more interesting things to consider.
    So I'll start with some naked admonishments, that is, unsolicited advice given in the imperative mode: do this!  Don't Do that!
    The next president is all sorts of historically special, may be extraordinarily aware and/or capable, may turn out lucky or not.  The important thing for people to keep in mind is that he is a politician and that we hired him to do political work.
    Politics is the practice of dealing in an ongoing manner with all the things that need to be done in a "society."  To have a "society" there has to be minimal provision for everyone in it.  Politicians attempt to build and maintain structures of production and distribution so that people don't all over die in the streets, etc.  Some people act in a primarily egalitarian manner and in the extreme are called "saints."  Other people act in a primarily selfish manner and in an extreme are called "sociopaths."  Both extremes and mid-rangers in that field of self-regard enter the field of politics and devise ideologies to explain and promote their habitual activities.  Perhaps, in human history there has been found a preponderance of sociopaths employed as politicians.
    Obama may turn out to be Joshua to Martin King's Moses, or more likely will turn out to be an ordinary character with some sort of fatal flaw, but he is still a politician whose job will be to get things done with the various sociopaths with whom he will have to deal because the have their hands on some levers.  That means he will produce a long string of half measures, imperfect approaches to inadequately appreciated situations, earmarked legislation, positions filled for political rather than practical reasons, one disappointment after another.  Even if he is Joshua the army that he's leading is, you know, us, and you know what kind of lazy, stupid, selfish good for nothings we are, don't we?  Plus all those complete jerks he has to do business with all the time.
    Joe Lieberman fer cryin out loud.  I mean it is just a big fat joke.  There'll be Obama going "My good friend Joe."  For the 58th vote, or the 60th, whatever.  Whatever Joe wants he's going to get.  And we Obama millenarians are going to go along with it because O's the one who may not give us anything we really want but will at least make the right noises, feel our pain.  Instead of the class warriors whining about class warfare as they steal from our pension funds.

2. What next.  I am writing from the perspective of a 56 year old.  I am actually on the dinosaur side of a tech situation that has rendered me substantially irrelevant to the youth of today.  My children spend major time interacting in venues I don't know about, use technology I don't know about, do things I never heard of, etc.  "Those people" just built an organization from nothing that took over the Democratic party, made the existing party structures irrelevant, elected a president, and we old people essentially had nothing to do with it.  It was a dump-the-old-people election and we got totally dumped.
    I will illustrate from my local perspective.  I was a precinct chair for the local Dems this year.  We had plans and programs and volunteers to do them.  Obama people came in for the primary and stayed.  They were dynamic and organized like we had never been and they did their thing essentially without reference to us and our plans.  It got so that they had so many people out doing Obama things, and including our local people of course, that the local party in October essentially said "never mind, go work with the Obama people."  They did our get out the vote job better than we ever had.  So, technically, nothing to complain about.
    The responsible thing to do now would be for that superb organization either to come to us like the Borg, resistance is futile, and I would happily go along as long as the goals and methods looked right for me, or, like missionaries of yore, to bring the new gospel and methods to the primitive heathens and to let us use them if we can, imperfect vessels that we are.
    We'll know soon enough if they intend to carry on into the new age, and if they do, are they capable.  That's neither here nor there.  What is here for all of the individual "us" is the ever-present opportunity to be involved in the political process, which is, for everyone, to talk with friends, relatives, neighbors, etc., and the politicians, to form interest groups and promote issues, to deal with people who seem to disagree with us on something in order to get stuff done, all that stuff that most of us (me included) don't like to do.  Because that's how it gets done, and if you don't do it and I don't do it either THEY will do it the way they want to do it which may not be the way WE want it done or it won't get done.
    The end of making excuses?  The beginning of personal responsibility?  We'll see.

3. About him.  Reagan was a guy who wanted to do something.  From my point of view what he wanted to do was base and ignoble, never mind it was a direct assault on my class interests (lower middle baby, toe that line, pay that mortgage).  He was pretty successful, and in the end a very few aspects of his program turned out to be not utterly bad.  Never mind.  We sense that perhaps Obama wants to do something too.  That he is becoming a president not primarily to please himself like Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Clinton.  They ran and ruled in vain and unsuccessful quests for self-validation, psychosomatic presidencies, if you will.  Obama, we think we sense, is different.  Some of us  imagine the things he seems to hope to do are in some way "progressive."  But we don't really know.  We've had bad luck for so many decades, we're jumpy about optimism.  The competent ones applied their competence to theft, lies, brutality, etc.  That we might actually get someone at long last who will push for reconciliation rather than victory.  The possibility is immensely scary even for people who yearn for it.  It is obscurely eschatological, is it not?
    We don't know.  But we will see.

More opinions - 100s of thousands of words!

This 1100 year old Arab joke seems obliquely appropriate to the American election year:
    A certain man claimed to be a prophet and was brought before the Sultan, who said to him, "I bear witness that you are a stupid prophet!" The man replied, "That is why I have only been sent to people like you."

reisbiz@earthlink.net
phone: (919) 787-0881
mail: Bob Reis, POB 26303, Raleigh NC 27611, USA