The mintage figure is usually the first number a buyer looks up, and it is the easiest one to find. Every date and mint mark has one, printed in the catalogs and repeated on every price site, and it carries a pleasant air of certainty. 484,000 struck. 4,450,000 struck. Done. The trouble is that a […]
Open two browser tabs, drop the same one-ounce gold coin into both carts, and the totals will not match. Neither seller is doing anything improper. The metal is identical, the weight is identical, and the spot quote feeding both pages came out of the same wholesale market seconds ago. Gold prices differ between dealers because […]
Half dollars stopped being pocket change a long time ago, so when one turns up in a coffee can of old coins it gets a second look. If it shows Benjamin Franklin on the front and the Liberty Bell on the back, it is ninety percent silver and it left a mint between 1948 and […]
The five-cent piece is the plainest thing in an American pocket. No silver, no gold, no eagle on the back, just a president and his house. It is also the only denomination still circulating in essentially the metal Congress gave it in 1866, and the one lawmakers are arguing over right now. The history of […]
Most American Silver Eagles are worth the silver inside them plus a modest premium for being a coin the whole market recognizes on sight. That is the entire story for the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of millions struck since 1986, and there is nothing wrong with it. A one ounce government bullion coin is […]
Gold opened Friday, September 11, 2026 at $4,359.40 an ounce, down roughly 1.1% from the previous close and the lowest the metal had traded since August 6. Ask around for a reason and you will get several. The August CPI report was due, expected to show consumer prices up 3.4% from a year earlier. Futures […]
Type “gold eagle” into a search box today and you will mostly get the modern one-ounce bullion coin the U.S. Mint has struck since 1986. That is a perfectly good coin, and we have written about it. But the eagle as a denomination is much older. It goes back to 1795, it was worth ten […]
The order window opened at noon Eastern on September 3. About eight minutes later, the U.S. Mint’s newest precious metals coin was unavailable. Buyers took 4,778 of the 5,000 authorized 2026-W American Eagle palladium coins, roughly 96 percent of the entire issue, and the Mint’s sales report published on September 9 confirmed the count. Palladium […]
Reach into a bag of 90 percent junk silver and sooner or later you will pull out a quarter with a striding figure on one side, an eagle in flight on the other, and a smooth blank step where the date ought to be. Dealers sort those into their own pile without much comment. The […]
The Federal Reserve spent three and a half years shrinking its balance sheet, then quietly stopped. Runoff ended on December 1, 2025. Since early January 2026 the System Open Market Account has been buying Treasury bills again, close to $250 billion of them by the start of July, and total assets stood at $6.74 trillion […]
