Er, uh, no, I was just in my kitchen, whipping up some from, uh, lead, yeah that's it!
I suspect she's talking about coins that were minted before the US stopped minting gold coins in 1933 (but wait, they started again in 2006!). There was a big deal last year (whoops, two years ago!) when the new "Buffalo" coins came out -- demand was so sharp, that apparently collectors stopped buying the old stuff, so the 'collector premium' dropped to its lowest level in a long time -- that is, close to melt value.
So the pitch was: buy those coins now, because they can't go down much further, but could go back up if collectors get interested again -- plus there's the potential upside of gold itself. Beats me, I think it'd be tough to store and insure. Some people like coins because they are separable: try selling half an ingot if you want to go to the Super Bowl!
> If you melt it down and pour it into a
> mold, how can you tell where the ingots came from?
If you do that with a coin, you've lost any premium it might have had for being collectable. But you also might have made it an expensive proposition to get someone to buy it, because now it doesn't have any markings from a producer that's known well enough. ".9999 HENWOOD'S KITCHEN" doesn't sell so hot these days.
And of course you'd have burned up some of it during the melting process ...
There are, of course, various ways to buy 'paper' (vaulted or trust'd) gold that's a lot easier to track. Or hey, there's always the futures markets ... my favorite way to test a world view.
/jordan