Coin Devaluation Term

[Mark A Mandel]

On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, Grant Barrett wrote:

#I cannot for the life of me remember the phrase we discussed some time ago
#that is used to describe the situation in which the face value of a coin is
#worth less than the metal contained to make the coin, usually resulting in
#the coins disappearing as they are sold for scrap.

(face value) - (specie value) = seigneurage, the sovereign's markup (not
counting costs of labor). So, negative seigneurage? Try an archive
search for "coin" or "face value".

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguist at Large