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Doing some cleaning and found an envelope with green coupons.
1950 C-series ten and twenty dollar bills
Bottom of bills is statement "will pay to the bearer on demand ten dollars
I realize these are issued before the silver certificate was nullified. I see nowhere on the bills anything indicating payable in silver dollars.
Was it just understood that the ten dollars was silver or was it only worth ten paper dollars in any equivalent. I have not researched this. Can someone clarify please? Are they worth anything? They are not in bad shape. I got them from a farmer decades ago for doing some work. Thanks

Someone may know more than me, but here is my understanding:

Not sure what you have but the U.S. government repudiated (polite word for defaulted) the silver certificates decades ago.

Federal Reserve Notes have similar language - which means you can redeem them for more FRNs lol

They should be worth face at least, perhaps a slight premium for their novelty. They would have to be in pretty nice condition to be worth much more over face.

https://www.silverrecyclers.com/blog/19 ... -bill.aspx

On the other hand, you refer to them as coupons. In the old days, bonds used to have coupons that you redeemed to get the interest, but the bonds typically had a larger face value than $20.

https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/ ... 5D0929EB20

The US technically went on a partial gold standard 1848 and a full gold standard in 1900, so silver pieces were just subsidiary coins, with less commodity value than the legal face value. But the US had large silver reserves so the silver certificates helped monetize that, though these were always lower denomination notes. By the 1950s, gold had ceased be minted as US coins or paid out to private citizens. So for all practical purposes, "will pay to bearer on demand 10 dollars" = "we will give you another 10 dollar bill in exchange for this one" . The exception was foreign central banks, who were able to arrange gold conversions for their dollar holdings under the Bretton Woods system. When too many foreign banks began demanding gold, Nixon "closed the gold window" in order to keep the US from losing all its gold, and from then on the US gold reserves play little direct role in the monetary system.

AGressive is right, with one small tweak.

FDR made it illegal for U.S. citizens to own gold back in 1933, and devalued the dollar. Devalue meant that prior to the devaluation, your dollar was worth 1/20 an ounce of gold, or you needed 20 dollars to buy a full ounce; after the devaluation, you needed $35. That was the last year the U.S. minted gold coins for all practical purposes. Ameriocans were required to turn in your gold for FRNs, and even if you had gold certificates the government just simply changed the rules (i.e. defaulted) and would not honor requests by U.S. citiens to redeem the notes for actual gold. The U.S. government continued to honor such requests by foreign governments, typically holders of large bonds, until 1971. There was a "gold pool" involving the U.S., Brittain, and several other countries that manipulated the price of gold to keept it at $35. France under DeGaulle eventually quit the pool and redeemed their dollars for gold. This put further pressure on the pool to manipulate the price, and eventually Nixon completely abrogated (defaulted) on the gold exchange clause.

An interesting side note, a lot of rich Americans stashed their gold in Switzerland. They stayed there for decades When PCGS came into existence, some wealthy collectors like Van Hall went over to Switzerland and started buying the gold coins and slabbing them because they had not circulated for decades.

Lemon Thrower wrote:An interesting side note, a lot of rich Americans stashed their gold in Switzerland. They stayed there for decades When PCGS came into existence, some wealthy collectors like Van Hall went over to Switzerland and started buying the gold coins and slabbing them because they had not circulated for decades.

Cool story! I assumed this happened but didn't know any names or anything. There was a big hoard of US $20 gold out of Canada with a similar storyline not long ago.

lol this was not a hoard. It was multiple hoards in swiss safety deposit boxes for 2-3 generations.