Hi SS. 2016 Panda arrived! "A bold new move by the China mint removes the ounce weight of their silver pandas and replaces it with a 30 g weight instead - this is a first for the series, likely an effort to get the remainder of the world to move away fro the troy ounce as a standard weight for bullion coins..." Source: moderncoinmart
Prices should adjust to the weight when they leave the mint, but with premiums all over the place at the moment and the new weights being something new, I wouldn't expect much change on the 1oz silver. Our article is up and we've go some better images of the whole range as there are 2 new gold weights. http://agaunews.com/?p=22671
Well at least they are now being honest about cheating their customers out of silver. I recently bought five 2015 pandas and as you all know, they didn't print any weight or AG purity on the 2015's.. The five I bought, I think only one weighed in at exactly 31.1 grams. The rest were between 30.8 and 31.0 grams... And based on other comments and things I have read about the 2015's, this in not uncommon.. Never will buy pandas again. Which is a shame cause I really like the coins otherwise.. Pandas demand high premiums anyways so I don't really understand the reason behind this. Why try to cheat your customers with the 2015's and then just stray from the worldwide standard on the 2016's? I don't think it will last long and they will eventually go back to the standard when sales start declining.... I know this is going to be a big turnoff with a lot of stackers???
The counterfeiting is what is really hurting the Pandas. The Chinese government not only does not take any action to stop the counterfeiters but makes it easier for them to counterfeit the coins. Why should a potential buyer trust coins supposedly minted by the Chinese government?
Well with 2015 being a transitional year, the lack of weight would indicate that some of the presses might've been changed during mintage to the new weight. This would cause variation in the different versions of the same coin, which would make the right weight more sought after in time. All one needs to look at is the history of coins and the changes to find that in a few years someone will publish what exactly happened and how many there are of the "correct" version and those will command a premium and be considered more "valuable". Counterfeiters in china are sentenced to Death or Life in Prison. The difference is, in china, life is not considered "that" valuable to a country of 1.4 billion. That being said, I suppose you trust the U.S. government with minting our money and the Fed for regulating supply, so why stack metals to begin with. Every country has its problems. China obviously has counterfeit issues, but to think the U.S. or any other country for that matter is not corrupt and fully trust worthy is a little ignorant and bias. I know you are a smart dude, but I see too many people hate on China when the U.S. has the very same problems and in some cases significantly worse, look at the 2008 crisis and 2001 bubble, banks were rescued while its citizens were left in debt. To its benefit, in a socialist nation, the greater good is the goal. Here in the States, corps have the rights of a citizen and more power and influence to lead the country. In China, the country leads the business. Sucks both ways.. lol.. Personally, I will buy the Panda's. Because I think the China gov't wants its people to start keeping more gold, hence more denominations. If the China market grows with PCGS and NGC's growing presense there, a mintage of 8 million to 1.4 billion population is tiny. Not like a mintage of 45 million ASE's for a population of 300m per year. I'm considering China as a growing consumer market and speculating that they will be interested in coins with their middle class as big as the entire population of the US, even though their market is slowing, they are still growing. Americans love ASE's, I think Chinese love Pandas and will eventually mint as many as ASE's for local market since that's how they are making their move towards. So many US folks are upset they swapped out of the ozt even though the world uses metric. Ultimately, I think China wants to show some strength in influence and see who will follow.
read this and you will understand whats going on. the only mints who have to change to the new standard are all others. metric will be the new standard wait 3-4 years and PM will also change http://forums.silverstackers.com/to...-the-first-new-pm-standard-bullion-coins.html
I know a lot of counterfeiting is done is China , but let us BE FAIR and compare apples with apples. The counterfeiting in China would not seem as bad if it was not from a single country. For instance if you combined the counterfeiting of Europe,USA,Russia,and Pakistan then it would not appear as bad. Now those 4 MASSIVE countries still do NOT have a population base as big as China. I see plenty of all sorts of coins and rounds faked (i do not buy them) and sold to the unwitting and i get just as grumpy as everoney else that this is allowed to happen. The day that fleabay and all the other auction sites ( they are all guilty) start cracking down on these fakes then the issue will improve, until then people are going to risk fakes if buying from individuals. We have a honking great problem here in NZ with our local online auction site as many individuals are buying FAKE alibaba crap stamped sterling jewelry and hocking it off as real. The auction site is not prepared to use their resources to combat this issue, but in their favor they have given me a personal company contact that i can call and they are happy to remove the offenders on my say so. The "offenders" can then reinstate their account if they prove their jewelry is genuine BUT NOT ONE OF THE 23 I HAVE HAD REMOVED have done so. It sucks that i do this for nothing, but the fact that i sell a lot of my jewelry on this site kinda makes up for the lost time on my part. Just saying
Just as a note to above. On our local auction site the listings do have a "report listing" button, but of the possible 100 odd times i have reported a listing the only time the site has taken action would be if it looked like they were going to lose fees ie:someone posting a phone number to do an offsite deal. The many fake i had reported got NO attention as far as i know as the auctions were allowed to continue. Now for those asking how i know fakes ? it is simple most of the time as the Alibaba fraudsters do not even bother to load their own pictures and copy them straight from the site they bought them. On a few occasions i have had to make small purchases to confirm my hunch , but again it is worth it if that means my GENUINE silver/gold chain will be purchased instead of the $5 fake Alibaba chains.
"Should" being the operative word.. If one runs the math, that's a lot of easy extra yuan falling right to the mint's bottom line every year.
