I just picked up my normal weekly two boxes of comingled dollar coins.
I popped open both boxes and all are the same machine wrapper as used
on only some of last weeks rolls - a very pale printing job on the
white paper. This week looks to have a decnet number of 2001-D mixed in
and fewer Susies than in the past. I will know more after I sort them
out and re-roll them later today or tomorrow morning.

This could be beginning to follow similar pattern of the Susies as they
dried up in the late 90's. Every other box in those days was completely
uncirculated and eventually we got the 1999-P SBAs followed in very
late 1999 and January 2000 with boxes of uncirculated 1999-D. That was
then followed by the comingled circulated Susies and a few GDs as they
started to arrive at Wal-mart and get re-circulated. Eventually we got
nothing but Bumblebee rolls after the Federal Reserve instituted a
program to ship nothing but new Golden Dollar coins for about a year
and a half. Since that ended it's been all comingled circulated coins,
but they seem to be getting used enough to spread them out into many
machines and pockets and cash registers, so they needed more to fill
bank orders.

I sent an e-mail to Coin World suggesting an article similar to their
article in 2002 that documented the inventories and draw-down rate of
dollar coins. Without Jim Benfiled they'll have to go directly to the
Fed and Mint to get that data (unless a contact at a congressional
office has that info).

I'll report my rough count on what I find in the boxes sometime
tomorrow (I hope).

-Fred Shecter