For most of American history, if you wanted a coin struck from pure gold, you had to look abroad. The United States alloyed its gold with copper for durability, from the Liberty Head pieces of the 19th century through the modern Gold Eagle. That changed in 2006, when the U.S. Mint released the American Buffalo, […]
Most of what you own leaves a paper trail. A brokerage account has a beneficiary form, a house has a deed, a bank account has a payable-on-death line you can fill in. A tube of gold coins in a closet safe has none of that. It carries no name, files no statement, and answers to […]
Pull up a live gold quote and you will see a single number climbing or sliding. Walk up to a dealer counter, or a dealer’s website, and that single number splits in two. There is a price to buy and a lower price to sell, and the space between them has a name: the bid-ask […]
A pre-1933 gold coin sits in an odd and appealing spot. It is real bullion, struck from the same metal that trades on the wire every morning, yet it also carries a design, a date, and a survival story that a modern round never will. That double identity is exactly what makes buyers ask whether […]
Ask most people where a new coin comes from and they picture engravers at the Mint sketching ideas and picking winners. The reality runs the other way. The United States Mint makes coins, but with very few exceptions it does not choose which ones. That decision belongs to Congress, and the road a coin travels […]
Gold gets called an inflation hedge so often that the label feels like settled fact. Then a hot inflation report lands at 8:30 in the morning, the figure comes in above what economists penciled in, and gold sells off. Buyers who expected the reverse watch the price fall on the very news that was supposed […]
Two American Silver Eagles can sit side by side in the same case. Each holds one ounce of the same .999 fine silver, wears the same design, and carries the same one dollar face value. One sells for a small premium over its metal content. The other can bring the price of a used car. […]
Few American coins carry as much romance as the Morgan silver dollar. It jingled across saloon bars in the mining West, sat in Treasury vaults for generations, and today anchors more beginner collections than any other classic U.S. coin. If you are weighing your first purchase, the honest question is whether Morgan silver dollars are […]
Gold hit the highest price in history — and one of America’s most-advertised gold dealers went bankrupt because of it. The metal was real. The promise wasn’t.
A company that sold “stability” on television for nearly two decades is now liquidating, with roughly 617 customers owed about $60 million — and its own filing lays out how it happened.
