There is a particularly repulsive commercial on TV for a gold coin that has a sliver replica of the World Trade Center and the USS New York on it. And if that isn’t tacky enough, the towers and ship can be made to stand perpendicular to the coin.
The claim is that the silver was salvaged from the WTC. I find the whole idea of marketing this stuff offensive and hope nobody buys the damn things, but I can’t help wondering…I can see how steel might have been salvaged, maybe copper, but silver? How much silver could there have been? And who would have sorted through the tons of rubble to find it?
I don’t have any idea if this particular company would have been able to get their hands on it to make tacky commemorative coins out of it, but it did exist.
The silver “salvaged” from the WTC was in bank vaults, and therefore relatively easy to recover; it’s not like they had to pick through the rubble looking for scraps of silver. I agree that using it for purely marketing purposes is in questionable taste.
I have a 1 oz. silver eagle in my coin collection. It looks like any other silver eagle, but the holder says that it was recovered from a vault in the WTC. It was given to me as a gift, definitely not something that I’d buy for myself.
Did you see the fione print? Each on has 14 mg of silver recovered from the World Trade Center. A single pre-1965 quarter has enough silver to strike 375 of these pieces of crap. That one ounce silver Eagle would make 1,900 of them, more if it’s one Troy ounce.
I saw that commercial last night, and the idea itself is absolutely repulsive – yet marketable, apparently. I’d purchase one, but only if it was genuine silver from Ground Zero – and that’s a pretty fucking big IF.
But hey, it’s a capitalist economy. It’s the best kind of free market system we’ve established so far, so we’re stuck with it for the time being.
I wouldn’t buy any of that commemmorative crap, the money just goes to line someones pockets, not to any sort of charity.
How about I sell squares cut off the clothing I wore at the site when I went there with the insurance company i worked for …? It is just as commemmorative and the money would go to a good cause [ME]
So now I’m curious about these bank vaults. I know vaults are built to withstand a lot, but the collapse of skyscrapers? I’m not doubting this happened, just curious as to how. Also, if the bank vaults were intact, was there no way to identify which vaults they were and therefore ID the owners of the goods? I realize the computer records may well have been destroyed, but surely there was some effort to get material back to its owners.
And I did not read the fine print on the ad–too horrified. Thanks for clearing up that part.
This reminded me of a “Pawn Stars” episode where someone came into the pawn shop with some small silver dishes that were allegedly from Hitler’s home in the mountains.
The owner was intrigued, but he refused to buy the silver. He stated that Nazi memorabilia is bad juju, and said he doesn’t deal in it.
Though the backgrounds are vastly different, I kind of feel the same about WTC stuff. Bad juju.
If you think about it, as much force as there is involved with a collapsing skyscraper, it isn’t very concentrated. They collapsed relatively slowly - they fell under their own weight, they weren’t smashed down - and along a broad front, not all concentrated onto the vaults like a hammer.
Absent any sort of evidence of chain of custody, there’s not any reason to believe the silver in coins is from the WTC, anyway. It’d be much easier and more profitable to just SAY it was - who’s gonna prove you wrong? - and anyone tasteless enough to sell such crap certainly isn’t going to balk at lying about it too.
These are different from the coins in the OP, but some 911 coins are certified by PCGS, the Professional Coin Grading Service. Looking them up, they’re just a company that grades coins for a fee and aren’t universally liked in the coin collecting community.
This site says these particular coins were actually there on 911, recovered, and are being sold. According to this site, when the vaults were reached during the cleanup, the coins were loaded into Brinks trucks and driven straight to PCGS’s parent company, Collectors Universe Inc, where they were put in individual capsules with a copyrighted flag insert to show they were from WTC, and they were later brought to market.
Ok, a government agency had vaults at WTC containing precious coinage. They dug this out of the rubble and gave it to a coin grading company to sell? Was there a “finders keepers” law in effect during the cleanup?
We had to file a claim with them at about 2am or something one night. The lady on the phone refused to believe that there was no valid mailing address at Tower 2 to explain where the accident happened (a fairly minor accident, btw - unless you’re the dude it happened to).
Me: Umm… well, there WAS an address here, but you might have heard about the whole WTC disaster thing… could we do this by fax or something?
Her: Sir, I need a proper address.
Me: How 'bout #2 WTC, New York, New York. But, we really don’t get mail here at the moment.
Her: No - I need the mailing address.
Me: Supervisor, please?
Her: We need a mailing address. Who is the account holder.
Me: Ummmm… the US government? Or the City of New York? Maybe the Port Authority? Listen, I’m sorry, but there’s really no mailing address - the place doesn’t exist anymore.
So… fuggit - I just dropped the bomb on some dipshit at the ops meeting in the morning.
ETA: I’m not hating on Liberty Mutual. They’re actually pretty good. That was just a frustrating-as-hell thing to deal with when one of the guys was hurt, we were busy as hell, and this jackhole didn’t seem to be aware that two big buildings blew up several weeks previously. Or just didn’t want to tell me that there was an input validation on her drone-screen and escalate it to someone who could do something.
Some of the vaults remained perfectly intact (and got extra-special armed escorts off-site by - allegedly - USSS). Some were damaged, but intact; one of our grapplers popped one open one night. Green confetti for a few moments… Some guys on my crew later confessed to having stuffed cash in their clothes, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.
I actually was off on the 11th, sitting there chatting with a friend on the phone watching my morning dose of CNN and watched the whole horrible mess happening pretty much live. We had a huge meeting, and all the CS supervisors had notebooks full of paperwork and contact information and lists of stuff we were authorized to do. Walking in on the 12th to a hastily arranged class on emergency handling was decidedly odd.
Too soon for this kind of thing. I’m not even comfortable with selling coal chunks recovered from the ocean floor where it was spilled out of the Titanic’s bunkers.
