Pull a Barber dime out of an old accumulation and the first thing you notice is what is missing. The word LIBERTY, which Charles Barber tucked onto a narrow band across Liberty’s brow, is usually rubbed flat. Thirty or forty years in cash drawers and coat pockets did that. It is also the single detail […]
Twenty gold coins, taped flat and threaded into the lining of a pair of trousers. That was the British Ministry of Defence’s answer during the 1991 Gulf War to an old and awkward question: what do you hand a soldier who might end up on the wrong side of a border with no usable currency? […]
It usually starts with a drawer. A parent’s old cigar box, a folded envelope of silver dollars, a few gold pieces somebody bought decades ago and never talked about. Somewhere in the sorting, a question arrives: should any of this go off to a grading service and come back sealed in plastic? Put plainly: is […]
Two Morgan dollars sit side by side in a dealer’s case. Same date, same mint, both sealed in PCGS holders, both labeled MS64. One of them has a small green sticker stuck to the front of the slab, and it is priced noticeably higher than its twin. Nothing about the grade on the label explains […]
Anyone who has bought bullion online has watched the little clock in the corner of the cart tick down, with a note that the price refreshes when it reaches zero. Plenty of first-time buyers read that as a pressure tactic borrowed from airline websites. It is closer to the opposite. That timer is the visible […]
Here is a puzzle that trips up a lot of otherwise careful buyers. The United States Mint struck a 24-karat gold coin with a final mintage under 2,000 pieces. It is a legal tender American coin, from a named federal program, in gold. By the arithmetic most people carry around in their heads, a thing […]
For three years the only question at a Federal Reserve meeting was how fast the committee would cut. On Wednesday afternoon the answer went the other direction. The FOMC raised its target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter point, to 3.75 percent to 4.00 percent, the first increase since July 2023, and […]
For eighty years the same face has looked left from the smallest coin in American pockets. That changed this spring. In April the U.S. Mint began shipping the 2026 Emerging Liberty dime, a one year design dated 1776 to 2026, and for the first time since 1946 a circulating dime left the presses without Franklin […]
Divide the price of gold by the price of silver and you get one number. On September 14, 2026, with gold trading near $4,288 an ounce and silver near $63, that number was about 68. It takes roughly 68 ounces of silver to buy a single ounce of gold. That is the entire calculation. No […]
Every bullion coin has an origin story, and the Canadian Gold Maple Leaf’s is unusually specific. By the late 1970s the South African Krugerrand had the private gold market mostly to itself, and then politics caught up with it. Boycotts and sanctions aimed at South Africa’s apartheid government made the Krugerrand awkward to buy through […]
