Most bullion coins ask for a certain amount of trust. You check the weight and the diameter, maybe you know the ring a good coin makes, and past that you are relying on the seal and the person who sold it to you. The Royal Mint decided that was not quite good enough. In the […]
In the spring of 1989, a broker at a national brokerage house could call a client and pitch a certified silver dollar in roughly the tone he used for municipal bonds. The coin arrived sealed in plastic with a grade printed on the label, the sales material carried performance charts, and for about eighteen months […]
At noon Eastern on July 16, 2026, the United States Mint began selling a coin that will not fit in a coin tube. It is shaped like the Liberty Bell, crack and all, with the yoke across the top and the skirt flaring at the bottom. Nothing about it is round. That is a bigger […]
A buyer who checks the Mint’s catalog on a Tuesday and again on Thursday morning can find the same proof gold coin carrying a different price, even when gold itself barely moved in between. Nothing improper has happened. The United States Mint reprices its collector gold on a published schedule, against a published table, and […]
The gold bar in the heist movie, the one an actor can barely lift off a pallet, is a real object with a published specification. It runs to roughly 27 pounds, and almost nobody outside a bank vault has ever owned one. At the other end of the ladder sits a one-gram wafer sealed in […]
Gold closed Friday, September 25, at $4,284.91 an ounce. That is a fine price by any standard that existed two years ago, and it is also roughly 23% below the $5,589.38 the metal touched intraday on January 28. Both facts are true at once, which is why the same question keeps arriving in two tones […]
One coin in the American series was actually disowned by the government that made it. In the summer of 1876 Congress stripped the trade dollar of its legal tender status and left it circulating anyway: a silver dollar from the U.S. Mint that the Treasury would no longer take at face value. It stayed in […]
Every major bullion coin has a face you learn to recognize without thinking. Liberty striding into the sunrise, the springbok in mid-leap, the maple leaf with its fine vein lines. China went the other way in 1982, and it is still the only mint of consequence that does: the panda on the reverse gets redrawn […]
The Mint held its design unveiling at the White House on September 21, which is not how most commemorative programs begin their public life. The occasion was the 2027 Working Dogs Commemorative Coin Program: three coins, three different kinds of working dog, and a set of designs that have been waiting in line since Congress […]
Ask a room of gold owners where their metal came from and most will name a dealer, a mint, or a grandparent’s safe deposit box. Ask where it came from before that and the answers thin out quickly. It is a fair blind spot. The gold market talks about interest rates, the dollar, and central […]
