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Back from Berlin’s coin show: Monday Morning Brief

The World Money Fair in Berlin represents a homecoming of sorts, as Coin World Senior Editor Jeff Starck explains. An auction and special events at the show helped launch the world coin calendar with gusto.

Full video transcript:

Good morning, welcome to an early edition of our weekly video. I’m Jeff Starck of Coin World.

I have just returned from Berlin, Germany, where I attended one of the most exciting coin shows all year – the World Money Fair.

As many as 10,000 collectors from Germany, Europe and around the world came to the Estrel Convention Center, the site of the show since 2006. This year’s fair, the 45th annual event, was a sort of homecoming in several ways. First, a highlight of Fritz Rudolph Kunker’s auction on February 4 was a silver Holey dollar from Australia that is now back in that country after decades away from the homeland.

Holey dollars were created in 1813 from world silver coins to meet demand in the young colony. The example in the auction was made from a 1777 silver 8-reals piece struck at Mexico City. The host coin is one of the oldest known for the Holey dollar issue. Australian dealer Ken Downie told Coin World that he bought the Holey dollar for one of his clients. And he paid more than a quarter of a million dollars U.S. for the coin. In Aussie funds, that’s more than four hundred thousand dollars.

Attendees witnessed a different sort of homecoming on Feb. 6. That was when a formal ceremony marked the handover of dies and punches that were once used to strike Chinese coins. The tooling was transferred to Germany’s state coin collection in Saxony, and special Chinese Panda medals were created in copper, silver and gold for the event.

Several times at the show, World Money Fair president Hans-Henning Goehrum referred to the attendees as a “numismatic family,” and family members from across the globe and across all sectors of the hobby came to Berlin for a family reunion in style. It’s an event many look forward to every year, myself included.

For those who could not be at the show, Coin World is covering it for you. Just follow us on online at CoinWorld.com, at Facebook, on Twitter and of course in print in your mailbox.

For Coin World, I’m Jeff Starck. Happy collecting!

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