Friday, December 16, 2011

Hedge Fund Pays Third Highest Price for Gold Coin ($7.4Mil)

Huge Caveat: This may be a marketing stunt.
Rather than being sold at auction the deal was brokered and announced by coin dealer Blanchard & Co. with both sides of the transaction to remain anonymous.

In July's "Where Did Ten of the Rarest Coins in the World Come From? (1933 Double Eagles)" I mentioned the #'s 1 and 2:
...That $7.6 mil. pricetag was the highest price ever paid for any coin anywhere until a 1794 "flowing hair" silver dollar was auctioned.

Here's the list at Born Rich....
And here's the headline story from the San Francisco Chronicle:
It seems the 1 percent isn't content with merely controlling 40 percent of the nation's wealth. It also now has the nation's most famous coin.

At least that's how it looked this week when a San Francisco coin dealer revealed that the 1787 gold Brasher Doubloon, probably the rarest of all American coins, has been sold to - you guessed it - a Wall Street investment firm.

The coin was worth $15 when George Washington's neighbor Ephraim Brasher minted it. The firm that bought it this month paid $7.4 million.

That's just under the record $7.6 million paid in 2002 at auction for a 1933 $20 gold Double Eagle.
"Who else could afford this but someone in the 1 percent?" said Don Kagin, the rare-coin dealer who sold the Brasher Doubloon to an intermediary at the beginning of December for more than $6 million in cash and other rare coins. That intermediary quickly sold it to a broker in New Orleans, who then sold it to the Wall Street firm.

Nobody involved is revealing the identity of the firm....MORE