AMERICAN EAGLE BULLION COINS Flying High

40-YEAR ANNIVERSARY IN GOLD, SILVER, PLATINUM AND PALLADIUM

- BY JOSHUA MCMORROW-HERNANDEZ

The American Eagle bullion coin program is a cornerstone of the United States numismatic collecting and investing scene. But American Eagles haven't always been a U.S. Mint mainstay.

Forty years ago, they were mere concepts on the proverbial drawing board. Many bullion investors and collectors were building numismatic sets and precious-metals portfolios with Canadian Maple Leafs, Mexican Libertads and Chinese Pandas. Those three programs debuted during the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of a small but growing body of modern bullion coins born after the debut of the South African Krugerrand in 1967. Yet, the U.S. Mint hadn't begun minting high-purity silver and gold coins, let alone palladium and platinum coinage, designed patently for bullion investment.

The origin story of the American Eagle traces back to the 1970s, when debates began about massive selloffs of government-stockpiled silver. The conversation continued in the corridors of Capitol Hill into the 1980s before taking a rather unexpected twist toward gold in 1985. While the success of the American Eagle program was once only the stuff of dreams, today few can imagine a world without these wildly popular bullion coins.

SELLING SILVER

American Eagle coins originally evolved from an effort to liquidate most of the nation’s physical silver reserves in the 1970s and early 1980s. The move was rooted in whittling down federal deficits, but not every-one was happy with the plan to sell silver to help make the nation more solvent. More than 130 million ounces of silver were stored in the Defense National Stockpile Center, a strategic reserve that houses a variety of critical raw materials such as titanium, cobalt, lithium and other resources that could be used for national defense.