Today let's check out a 1oz silver trade unit that came about as a result of the Hunt brothers unsuccessful attempt to corner the silver market in late 1979 and early 1980. They eventually managed to accumulate two-thirds of the entire global supply of privately owned silver.
If your interested in that story, this is a good article.
Silver spot price hovered around $7/oz for most of 1979. By late December, 1979 it had risen to nearly $25/oz. On January 20, 1980, silver hit an all-time high of $49.45/oz. From here spot price started to decline and by March of that year had lost half the January 1980 value. However, price was still artificially high so the US government took a step that led to this round being minted from US stockpile silver.
On March 14, 1980, President Jimmy Carter approved legislation abolishing the United States Assay Commission. This was done for many reasons and one of them was to auction off the US silver stockpile to bring the silver spot price down to what was considered "appropriate" prices.
And that's how we get to this round (along with various weight silver bars) being minted by the Continental Coin & Jewelry Company based in Van Nuys, California (mintmark CC).
Continental Coin bought a large portion of the assay office stockpile and minted a variety of rounds and bars. You can see those and read more in this article.
The rounds came in two variants type 1 and type 2. The difference being the eagle on the obverse, type 1 displays the Eagle preparing to land, whereas, type 2 (the one pictured here) displays the Eagle preparing to fly away.
Was happy to pick this up and learn more about it. Have a gr8 day #fam.
