Is Fine Silver Tableware Too Formal for Today’s Households?

Is Fine Silver Tableware Too Formal for Today's Households

One complaint often made about solid silver tableware is that it is old fashioned and no longer fits with our modern lifestyle.  The younger generation prefers apartments and houses with open floor plans and informal eating spaces.  This trend is reflected in the abandonment of formal dining rooms along with everything that used to populate them: fine china, crystal and yes, silver.

There is a grain of truth to this myth.  It is true that the modern lifestyle lends itself to informality.  But fine silver tableware fits into an informal or semi-formal setting far better than most expect.

I think a lot of people are intimidated by silver because grandma only got her good service out for special occasions.  And she would yell at you if you accidentally dropped your fork.  And she would hand wash every piece immediately after dinner.  And she would periodically polish it too.  You get the picture.  So it’s only natural that most people would view fine silver tableware as fragile and fussy formal dining-ware.

But the truth is rather different than grandma would have you believe.  Solid silver tableware is actually pretty tough stuff.  You can use it on a regular, even daily, basis and it will last for many, many decades, if not centuries.  It isn’t nearly as sensitive to mistreatment as the purists would claim.

For example, I regularly use a set of one dozen antique French silver-plated teaspoons from the late 19th century.  I had purchased them on a whim from an antique shop for about $30.  It seemed a waste to leave them buried in a closet, so I started using them daily.

I put them through the dishwasher along with all my other stainless steel utensils.  I never polish them – ever.  I often leave them in the sink along with other dirty dishes for most of the day, until I run the dishwasher later at night.  I even accidentally got one caught in the garbage disposal once.

Guess what?  My century old antique French silver-plated teaspoons look as good as the day I bought them.  Well, all of them except for the garbage disposal victim.  He ended up a bit mangled.  But the other silver spoons look great.  They never tarnish and are just as serviceable as my other, stainless steel flatware.  They look great at parties, regardless of whether those events are formal, semi-formal or completely informal.  And you haven’t really lived until you’ve eaten ice cream with a real, solid silver spoon.  It is an experience unlike any other – the very essence of luxury.

Now I can understand that there might be limitations to using fine silver tableware on a regular basis.  You probably want to reserve your English 18th century Hester Bateman sterling silver coffee set for special occasions only.  It would be too valuable for daily use.  But most sterling silver isn’t.  Most solid silver trades at modest to moderate premiums over its bullion value.  So if the worst happens and you absent-mindedly cram a piece or two into your garbage disposal it won’t be a great loss.

The world is full of jaw-droppingly gorgeous fine silver tableware that fits every taste and budget.  It would be a shame to abandon it to stuffy drawers or safety deposit boxes when you could be luxuriating in its elegance on a regular basis.  Antique silver tableware is durable, beautiful, functional and so much more stylish than pedestrian stainless steel.  Grandma might have only gotten out the good silver for holidays, but some rules were meant to be broken.

Georgian Sterling Silver Madeira Grape Leaf Decanter Label 1833

Georgian Sterling Silver Madeira Grape Leaf Decanter Label 1833
Photo Credit: Bateman-Silver

Georgian Sterling Silver Madeira Grape Leaf Decanter Label 1833

Buy It Now Price: $116.91 (price as of 2016; item no longer available)

Pros:

-This is a lovely example of an antique British sterling silver wine or decanter label from the Georgian period.  It depicts a magnificently sculpted grape leaf with the word “Madeira” pierced through it.

-This Madeira wine label measures 5.1 cm (2 inches) across and weighs 14.4 grams (0.46 troy ounces).  It is made of heavy gauge silver and features good workmanship.

-Wine labels – also known as bottle tickets, decanter labels or liquor labels – were hung on liquor bottles in the 18th and 19th centuries to identify the type of alcohol they contained.  This was necessary because the paper liquor labels we are familiar with today only became legal in Great Britain in 1860.

-There was a dizzying variety of sterling silver liquor labels produced throughout the 18th, 19th and even into the 20th centuries, including port, Sherry, Madeira, whiskey, gin, rum, brandy and scotch labels, among others.

-Madeira was a type of fortified wine produced in the Portuguese Madeira Islands that was very popular in Great Britain and its American Colonies.  No wealthy British gentleman’s wine cellar in the late 18th or early 19th centuries would have been considered well stocked without at least a few cases of Madeira wine.

-This Madeira wine label was created in 1833 by Charles Rawlings and William Summers, silversmiths who worked in London from 1829 to about 1860.

-The piece possesses the appropriate hallmarks for the period: the sovereign’s head duty mark, the famous lion passant hallmark guaranteeing sterling fineness and the date letter signifying 1833.  This well-made specimen is well worth the $117 asking price.

 

Cons:

-While the Madeira wine label is in good condition considering it is over 180 years old, the back has been reinforced with a small silver strip on the left side.  It is uncertain when this very minor repair was made.  It is even possible it is original to the piece.  In any case, it is almost unnoticeable and does not impact the value of the item significantly.

-Madeira wine labels with grape leaf motifs are fairly common and therefore less desirable than liquor labels with unusual shapes, rare liquor types or odd spellings.

The Monumental Clash Between Spenders and Savers

The Monumental Clash Between Spenders and Savers

We live in a world dominated by the financial clash of two titanic groups: spenders and savers.  Spenders like to borrow, shop and consume until the credit card is declined.  Savers enjoy squirreling away their hard earned lucre in bank CDs, savings accounts and the stock market.  Spenders and savers can be coworkers, neighbors, friends and family members.

And yet these two groups are always at odds.  Spenders want easy money policies.  They want low interest rates, readily available credit and high inflation.  These attributes are conducive to their preferred free-spending financial lifestyle.  Savers, on the other hand, favor a more restrictive monetary system.  They desire high interest rates, tight lending conditions and little or no inflation.  These economic circumstances allow savers to reap the full reward of their saving activity.

If you are reading this article, there is a good chance you are a saver.  Unfortunately, if that is the case then I have bad news for you.  Since World War II the U.S. financial system has been operated in favor of spenders.  The U.S. Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury have cooperated for the last 75 odd years to ensure that inflation is always appreciably positive, interest rates don’t rise too high and credit is always accessible to both businesses and consumers alike.

There was a little bit of a silver lining for savers though.  While the U.S. financial system has been generally tilted towards spenders for decades, this bias wasn’t egregious.  Bank savings accounts paid interest rates above the rate of inflation.  The Federal Reserve tolerated moderate inflation, but always reigned in excessive dollar devaluation.  And credit availability was traditionally subject to fairly strict qualification rules.  These compromises may not have been ideal for savers, but they were good enough most of the time.

And then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 hit.  Bank savings accounts and CDs started paying practically nothing.  The Federal Reserve, along with central banks all over the world, enthusiastically declared that they would tolerate as much inflation as they could create.  And the U.S. Treasury bailed out systematically important, too-big-to-fail banks like Citibank, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase on the implicit condition that they make loans available to anyone who can fog a mirror.  Suddenly the age old struggle between spenders and savers didn’t seem so balanced anymore.  Spenders – governments, corporations and individual consumers – were the big winners while savers were left behind.

This brings us to the present.  Today we live in an economy that is highly financialized, dominated by grotesquely oversized banks that feed at the government teat.  Traditional investments, regardless of whether they are stocks or bonds, pay miniscule dividends or interest.  And, much to our chagrin, we’ve discovered that debt is the new financial heroin of our age.  But the real question is where do we go from here, especially those of us who are savers?

Unfortunately, I have more bad news for savers.  Inflation is basically a form of wealth redistribution from savers to spenders.  For many decades after World War II inflation was low and this process of redistribution was, consequently, slow.  But in spite of inflation not being particularly high since the Great Financial Crisis, redistribution has increased in pace.  This is primarily due to the fact that savers can’t earn a guaranteed return above the rate of inflation anywhere.  But this uneasy stalemate between spenders and savers will not last forever.

While it probably won’t happen within the next few years, one day the United States will experience a currency crisis.  I define a currency crisis as being an abrupt decline in the foreign exchange value of a country’s currency by anywhere between 50 and 90 percent.  This event will shake the foundations of the international financial order.  Currency crises usually happen after many years of a slowly deteriorating fiscal position.  As the grandfather of modern economics Adam Smith once commented, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”  In fact, it is usually telegraphed for so many years beforehand that everybody assumes it won’t or can’t happen.  However, when the crisis finally hits, it often unfolds faster than even the most pessimistic observer thought possible.

How can a saver protect himself?  Ultimately, all wealth is physical.  Central banks, financial institutions and corporations can print money, issue debt and sell stock.  But none of these actions truly increases the amount of wealth present in an economy.  They are dilutive, redistributive processes, effectively moving wealth from savers to spenders.  The astute saver will realize this and convert much of his hard earned money into tangible assets.  Whether those assets consist of bullion, real estate, commodities or fine art and antiques is largely a matter of personal preference.  What is important is that you do it while you still can.  The final destination of a debt saturated economy is always a currency crisis and the clock is ticking for the United States.  Art, antiques and other tangible assets are a great way to protect yourself.

Euro Currency Déjà vu – The Latin Monetary Union

Euro Currency Déjà vu - The Latin Monetary Union

The European common currency – the Euro – is often thought of as a new and bold political experiment of the 21st century.  As of 2016, 19 members of the European Union use the Euro, which has also become the world’s second most traded currency.  But as groundbreaking as many believe the Euro is today, it wasn’t Europe’s first common currency.

That honor belongs to the now defunct Latin Monetary Union.  The Latin Monetary Union was established in 1865 by founding members France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland.  This arrangement wasn’t a single currency among participating members per se.  Instead, each country retained its individual national currency, but harmonized the weights and finenesses of their gold and silver coins.  This was possible because countries in the mid 19th century relied on fixed gold or silver standards.

A single currency unit in the Latin Monetary Union was defined as a 5 gram coin of 83.5% fine silver.  The largest silver coin was 5 units, weighing 25 grams of 90% silver.  The workhorse high denomination gold coin was 20 units, weighing 6.4516 grams of 90% fine gold.  And the largest gold coin was 100 units, weighing a hefty 32.258 grams of 90% gold.  Any silver coins smaller than 5 units were only struck in 83.5% silver because they were fiduciary coinage only, ineligible to settle large payments or debts.

Although there were only four participants to the agreement initially, membership soon grew.  Romania, Spain and Greece joined in 1868.  Peru, Columbia and Venezuela soon followed.  Finland, Serbia and Bulgaria also adopted the standard.  Austria-Hungary went halfway, striking some coins that matched the Latin Monetary Union’s requirements and others that did not.

Even tiny Albania joined the Latin Monetary Union upon its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, although it didn’t mint coins until the 1920s.  So many coins were struck to Latin Monetary Union standards in the late 19th and early 20th century that they are still commonly encountered in the collector’s market today.

In hindsight the Latin Monetary Union was shockingly successful.  A preponderance of European nations joined the treaty along with a handful of Latin American countries as well.  It wasn’t perfect however.  At first the free coinage of both silver and gold was embraced.  This meant that an individual could go to the national mint of a Latin Monetary Union member with either raw gold or silver and have it coined into legal tender.

But due to the discovery of massive quantities of silver in Nevada’s Comstock Lode in the Western U.S. in the 1860s, the price of silver soon declined precipitously in relation to gold.  This naturally led to destabilizing arbitrage, where people took cheap, raw silver to the mint to have it coined and then exchanged it for more valuable gold coins.

This situation eventually forced the Latin Monetary Union members onto a de facto gold standard when they finally agreed to limit the quantity of silver coins they would mint.  Some countries could not resist the temptation to debase their money, however.  Greece, that perpetual basket case of monetary intransigence, was expelled from the Latin Monetary Union in 1908 due to recurring debasement.  In spite of these occasional problems, the Latin Monetary Union flourished from its founding in 1865 until the onset of World War I in 1914.

World War I, though, was the final twilight of the Latin Monetary Union.  The war blew out the national budgets of all belligerent nations.  The countries involved in the global conflict turned to the expediency of currency debasement in an attempt to ameliorate their fiscal plights.  This rendered the previously robust international monetary agreement inoperative almost overnight.

A couple nations not involved in the war – Switzerland and Venezuela – struggled on issuing coins that conformed to the old standard for decades to come.  The fatally wounded Latin Monetary Union was finally officially euthanized in 1927 after it became apparent that most nations involved in World War I were never going to reestablish their pre-war parity gold standards.  Lonely Switzerland struck the final coinage adhering to the old specifications in 1967 – a 5 gram 1 franc piece and a 10 gram 2 franc coin, both of 83.5% silver.

Thus a noble, if doomed, experiment in international monetary synchronization ended.  I suspect that barring a full political union, the current Euro currency will share the same fate as its Latin Monetary Union predecessor.  The massive, unrelenting forces clawing at the periphery of Europe’s current pecuniary arrangement are already plainly obvious to the casual observer.  How long the Euro lasts is anyone’s guess, but I doubt it will even take a world war to dismantle it.