For twelve years, the loose change in American pockets carried a rotating gallery of national parks, forests, and historic sites. The America the Beautiful quarters program ran from 2010 through 2021, and by the time it wrapped up it had put 56 different reverse designs into circulation, one for every state, the District of Columbia, […]
Pull a tray of Mercury dimes across a coin show table and something happens: people who never look twice at a modern quarter slow down. The little silver dime with the winged head is one of the most admired designs the United States ever put into pocket change, and it circulated by the billions from […]
The stack in your safe is real money. Your homeowners policy does not see it that way. To most standard policies, a shelf of gold and silver counts as loose change, capped at a figure that would not replace a single ounce. That gap is quiet until the day you file a claim, and by […]
Reach into a pocket of loose change and the quarter is the coin you notice first: heavier than a dime, wider than a nickel, the workhorse of parking meters and laundromats for generations. It is easy to take for granted. Yet the 25-cent piece has one of the longest and most restless design records of […]
The textbook version is tidy. The Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, gold has no yield to compete against, so money rotates into the metal and the price climbs. People repeat that story because it is right often enough. The trouble is that the historical record is far messier than the textbook, and a saver who […]
Before Augustus Saint-Gaudens gave the $20 gold piece its striding Liberty, another double eagle carried American commerce for more than half a century. The Liberty Head double eagle, also called the Coronet type, ran from 1850 to 1907, longer than any other regular gold coin the United States has produced. It was born out of […]
Type a coin into one search bar and you get a number. Type it into a different site and you get a different number. A dealer at a show quotes a third. None of them are lying. They are answering slightly different questions, and once you know which question each source is answering, the numbers […]
Two American Silver Eagles can sit side by side in the same case, hold the same troy ounce of .999 silver, and carry different price tags. One is a brand-new coin fresh from this year’s production. The other changed hands a few years ago and came back to a dealer’s counter. Same metal, same design, […]
In 2007 the U.S. Mint set out to do for the presidency what the 50 State Quarters had done for the map: put a rotating cast of familiar faces into everyday pockets and get the country collecting again. The quarters worked. The presidential dollar coins did not, at least not the way Congress hoped. What […]
Walk into any coin show and you will find a table of modern commemoratives, still in their original Mint boxes, priced barely above what the metal alone is worth. They are beautiful coins, struck to honor everything from national parks to civil rights pioneers, and they sit at the exact seam this desk cares about: […]
