Glad to see all you American Silver Eagle (ASE) Folks had Fun with my last Post.

I was curious to see if the American Silver Eagle (ASE) folks could find anything interesting to say in response to my last post. A few comments actually got the point that the U.S. Mint is churning out recycled images from the past to sell mountains of Silver and Gold bullion in the form of coins. The quality of the U.S. Mint ASE and American Eagle Gold coins is such that nearly all are Mint State or Proof 69/70 and nearly all the Proof coins are Deep Cameo / Ultra Cameo. In truth there isn't much difference with these bullion coins for any collector to find. The U.S. Mint is also churning our Hundreds of Thousands of Proof bullion coins and Millions of Mint State ASE bullion coins in most years. All are being saved and/or collected. As such there are few really rare bullion coins and folks end up focusing on collecting labels such as 25th Anniversary.

The whole reason ASE coins were created in the first place was to sell off excess Silver in the U.S Government's National Defense Stockpile and help fund the U.S. Government. The opinion was that bullion coins would sell better than simple bars of bullion silver. The U.S. mint then recycled the Liberty Walking obverse as it was a popular and the thought was it would help in the marketing. This was obviously successful based on some of the responses to my last post. This initial sell off of silver was accomplished around 2002. Congress then authorized the U.S. Treasury to simply buy silver on the open market and keep selling this bullion to the public in the form of coins in whatever quantity they wished.

So collecting ASE does help the U.S. silver mining industry and it does help fund the U.S. Government and those are good things, but is it really coin collecting or buying bullion in the form of coins instead of bars? I leave that for you to decide.

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