THE JULY EDITION OF COIN NEWS IS NOW ON SALE! Britain's biggest-selling coin magazine, incorporating Banknote News, is now on sale at newsagents, from the Token Publishing office, or through our website www.tokenpublishing.com
Wives of the Flavian Emperors
The women behind the rulers
Dates for deliberation
Scrutinizing key years in the annual reports of the Royal Mint
Mystery of Henry Morgan part II
Continuing the search for the elusive Henry Morgan
India's reclusive numismatists
Meeting the leading lights of India's numismatic scene
The underside of the coin
Close-up on the countermarked coin
A theatre in Bath
Brass tickets to a show
Designs on coins
John Andrew talks to Rod Kelly
Yorkshire coiners
Spotlighting the West Yorkshire counterfeiters
The dating game
Explaining the dating dilemmas
Banknote feature
Isle of Man banknotes
The astonishing number of issues from a small island
Regular features
Editor's Comment
Coin news & views
Around the World
New issues coin update
Royal Mint Bulletin
Market Scene
Price Guide - half crowns
Bookshelf
Coin Classroom
The Lexicon
Spotlight on the sovereign
Coin Clinic
Banknote News
New issues banknote update
Price Guide - Isle of Man
York Feature
Letters to the Editor
Dealers' lists
Fair diary
Auction diary
Societies diary
Semi-display adverts
The Web Page
Classified Advertising
Advertisers Index
Back to Basics
It seems “We’re all doomed” (the words of Private Fraser from Warmington-on-Sea’s Home Guard from Television’s Dad’s Army for those who don’t know) scream at us from the front page of every newspaper and headline and every news website. Rising oil prices, rising food prices, the credit crunch, the housing bubble bursting, unemployment on the rise and a Government that’s seeing its popularity rating plummet almost daily, are all conspiring to ensure that we are, apparently, heading for a huge economic downturn—or so the media would have us believe. Certainly there’s no doubt that things are getting tougher, the fact that it now costs 30 per cent more to fill a tank with diesel than it did this time last year and the fact that our food staples seem to be costing more every week, can only leave us all feeling poorer but I’ll stick my neck out here and say for many of us, at least in our hobby, things really aren’t as bad as they may seem. Most of us won’t be too affected by the credit crunch—many of us are in “late middle-age” and are close to paying off our mortgages if we haven’t done so already. We don’t plan to continue an upward trend on the property ladder and whilst we might have been planning to down-size, we are quite happy to wait until things stabilise a bit. If we are coin collectors the chances are we aren’t on very low incomes and whilst it’s true that we might not all be earning mega-money in the city nor are we struggling to decide whether we should “eat or heat”. The fact that we’ve had enough disposable income to spend on our hobby indicates that we would be considered by many to be “comfortable” and as such we’re not feeling the real effects of the current “crisis” in the same way as some.
