A Old Coin Collection and Currency Debasement

Greetings Me Droogs N Droogettes!
Gretchen got her nails done today by a friend of hers. Chick actually came by and did them in the living room. They trade services with each other, Liz gets her hair done by Gretchen, and Gretchen gets her nails done. Works out pretty well for each of them, as man I never knew how much nails, hair and whatnot actually cost as the Xwife never had her nails done professionally, and she did her own dye jobs out of a box.

Not that back then -I- would have known the difference right?

Now that I do, OMFG a set of gel nails?
Fully installed/painted and whatnot!?!
OUCH!!!!

There’s a reason modern whammez are always broke and looking for a sugar-daddy. Prices like that for just the nails? Never mind a professional level cut/dye/blow on the hair???

Like going into three bills at least for all the things.

That being said, I have zero complaints really. Gretchen being a top professional in the area, she cuts deals with others in the field so’s she generally doesn’t have to pay out of pocket… except for pedicures… and those? Well ever since she introduced me to them? As long as -I- get to go and get one as well, I’ll shill the $$$ IF it’s in the budget that month.

As of now, it hasn’t been for a while, and my nails are getting into ‘tree- climbing’ length… Jes’ Sayin’

So, either way, the house was smelling like a nail salon for a bit… like ‘get high from the fumes’ smell… no open flames please! As they wound up, Gretchen asked be if I had some cash to tip her fren, and I ended up digging into the “Cash-Money Skull” to get the tip $$$.

The “Cash Money and Coin Money Skulls” are literally what they are designated as:

The O.D. Green one gets the ‘folding cash’… i.e. those random single dollars you find in your pocket, all by their lonesome. The regular bone colored one gets the random spare change I end up with at the end of the day. That’s also the one with the “Good Idea Fairy Pin” from Mark Baker is pinned into the forehead…

As you can see, the Coin Money Skull is almost ready to be emptied. Usually I get between $20-50 in coin out of it when I clear it out. If it’s exceptionally heavy on $.25 coins, I’ve actually gotten I think it was like $64. (I believe that was the record.) The Cash Money Skull rarely gets anywhere near full because cash IS cash and ‘reasons’. The ‘rando-laundry $$$’ also goes in there up to and including $10 dollar bills… Twenties get put in the wallet.

The only rule on BOTH Skulls is they never get completely emptied out. Old Irish? Superstition maybe? Money begets Money? Something like that…

So after I paid out Gretchen’s tip $$$ I went to gather up the other ‘stashes’ of coin around here so I only make one trip to the bank. I have a couple or three other spots that ‘catch my coin’ in the bedroom as well. That’s when I found my old coin collection that my Grandpa gave me EONS ago. He collected the majority of them during his travels ALLLLLL over the world back in the day.

Now, I know they’re not really worth anything, value/collectible wise. But to me, they have some meaning… and some of them are just plain cool AF on their own. Three of them I found today (it’s been forever since I cataloged them…) were pretty cool, as well as a few others, so I figured I’d share.

First up:
Two British Pennies, and a Half Penny:

The cool thing is the two ‘full’ pennies, the dates are 1912 (pre-war) and 1918 (post? war maybe?). The ha’penny was made in 1952. Now, for scale, here they are with, on the left a British Sovereign, (1oz pure silver) and on the far right, a US Quarter for scale:

The dates on those are a wee bit better… focal points are a pain. Jes’ Sayin’. So yeah, the pennies are BIG honkin’ coins. They’re well worn too. At least they’re still legible. They’re only worth about $4-5 each, so I’ll just hold onto them. I was mainly surprised as they’re made almost exclusively of copper, and copper was a scarcity during WW1 due to the Brit DotMil manufactories needing it for ammo. But it seems in real time, 100+ years later, there’s still a HUGE amount of them in circulation.

Next up is the Soviet Coins:

THESE are pretty damn cool IMO.

A rarity in that back then, they (the Soviets) almost never let their money outside their borders nor foreign money into their ‘closed-circuit financial world’ so to speak. Strict cash controls, to the point BOTH of my Grandparents got hemmed up by the KGB/STASI when they did a pat-down on Grandma on a train while travelling in Hungary in 1956, and they found a roll of unauthorized USD $$$ in her bra. Cash smuggling back then, behind the Iron Curtain was a big no-no. Another story for another time… anyways…

These are Kopek coins. The larger one being a 2 Kp from 1961, the other a 1 Kp from 1940. THAT one (the 1940 one) I found surprising as again I figured itty-bitty coins like that would have been smelted down for ammo. Part of the reason I say ‘itty-bitty’ is, well, they are:

That’s a US dime for a size reference. The 1 Kp is even thinner than the dime if you can believe it… a Baby Kopek INDEED

Then, another interesting historical note about the “Iron Curtain” is that Grandpa was in Czechoslovakia in the 30s before it became part of the Warsaw Pact. On that trip, he got the coins on the left, dated 1924 and 1922 respectively. After the Czechs became part of the greater “USSR”, he went back, and got the coins on the right, dated 1962 and 1967:

What’s cool here is that the 1920’s coins, the ‘header’ around the outside calls it “Republika Ceskoslovenska” i.e. the “Czechoslovakian Republic” and in the 1960’s, the coins call it
“Ceskoslovenska Socialistika Republika” being my guess “The People’s Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia” Then they kept the ‘Rampaging Lion’ motif, but under Communism, they added a star above it, and reduced the ‘flair’ so to speak.

I got no idea what the current coinage looks like.

Then, lastly, a couple of coins that tell a story so to speak. Much like the Czechoslovakian ones… these however are from Germany.

One Pre War, the next two made before the war, but used throughout, and the last minted Post War. Now this part of my poast has got really nothing to do politically speaking. I mean it does, but it doesn’t. YMMV, draw your own conclusions. What it does however speak volumes as to currency debasement. The coins in question:

The coin on the far left was minted in 1923 for the “Deutsches Reich“, the Weimar Republic era. It’s a cheap aluminum coin, very unsubstantial. Even feels cheap AF. Almost like a carnival token…

The next two were both minted in 1938, right as the war was about to break out. Both are made of copper and marked “Deutsches Reich” as well, except these have “MustacheManBad’s Twisted Cross” on them.

The last was made in 1952. It’s marked simply “Deutschland” and it too is made of some cheap assed zinc/aluminum metal, and is from East Germany.

The obverse of all of them:

Now, I juuust realized that that East German coin? Might be worth something… I didn’t even realize it was a East German Kraut-Koin…

WHOA!
THAT I might have to sell off… $200 is a good exchange IMO. Not only that, but mine is in as good as, if not better shape. Need to get mine rated…

Anyways… my point of this exercise:
The left coin… can you see the valuation? If not, here’s a better shot:

That’s 200 MARKS.

When I -first- got stationed in Germany in 1994, one US dollar was worth 1.742 German marks. Theoretically, a 200 mark coin would have been about $116 USD +/- in 1994. In this case, the German Mark was sooooo devalued, debased and worthless in 1923… Hell, the Mark took a giant shit thanks to the unrealistic and ruinous Peace Treaty… it left the Weimar Republic completely penurious , and eventually was out on it’s ass because of shit like this. I mean even comparing the thickness of the coins:

That 200 Mark coin is ‘wafer thin’ as they would have said in that Monty Python sketch w/Mister Creosote. The pfennig is/was the German equivalent of the penny, while the Mark is the German equivalent of the dollar, least way it used to be until the Eurotrash and EuroWeenies took over and invented a new multinational currency out of thin fucking air. NOW the Mark and Pfennig have gone the way of the Czech coins above, as they too got “Euro’d”.

Point is however is that that 200 Mark coin? It’s the physical embodiment of a debased and worthless currency. One that had no, nor held no value, even to it’s own people. I mean it’s easy to look it up… hyperinflation in Germany during the Weimar Republic is easily verifiable. Wiki that shit. A bad economy coupled with an incompetent government was one of the reasons that MustacheManBad was able to take over.

We’ve all seen a couple pics from back then, one of the more famous ones being this:

Now some people have tried to debunk this as a Bank Manager rolling out the $$$ to his tellers in the morning, but even then… I mean isn’t that a lot of cash? I mean even if it was payday, from my POV? That’s a fuckton of bricks of $$$ and I can’t even see what denomination(s) the bills are/were. The pic IS historically accurate in that it WAS taken in Germany, around the mid-to-late 1920s/early 30s.

Another chart I found is the “How many Marks to buy and Oz of Gold?” chart:

Oof.
Silver closed here at what recently?
$31.83.
After sitting at about $23 on average for over a year…

And Gold?
Closed at $2417.00
This after being completely and utterly artificially repressed at the average of $2k for like ever

The wheels, much like Weimar, are finally starting to come off

There is no way (outside of a huge war, and we’ve all ALREADY covered that potential shitshow) that they can get things under control. I mean the profligate spending, the blatant money laundering… everyone knows it, everyone can see it… it’s just a matter of what ‘trips the circuit’ first…

Nope… not much to be done ‘cept grab the popcorn, sell that Pfennig and then use the proceeds to get Addy a new book or three, Kylie a new dolly, and if there’s anything left over, a couple of boxes of MOAR Ammo.

There’s never too much to be had.

More Later
Big Country