Why $50 On Gold & $1 On Silver Has Been Printed On?

It used to be $20 for gold and $1 for silver (Double Eagles and Morgans), Canadian maple leafs have a face value of $5

In my honest opinion we will never go back onto a gold standard, if there has been less than 7 billion ounces of gold ever mined... 7 billion people each hoarding 1 ounce of gold and there is none left, the population of people has out striped the population of gold and other precious metals.

I'd have to say the reason they put $ amounts on them is to classify them as "COINS" and not simply bullion so they can ask OUTRAGIOUS premiums, drop mint numbers and make key dates to get a Numismatic fever going with people like us.

I think it's a conspiracy! The American Union is already creating shadowy patterns for its new gold-backed currency, and is cleverly disguising them as mass-marketed bullion coins. Here come the black helicopters...

Basically, adding a denomination gives prestige to these metal objects. The United States' first gold bullion was actually a series of gold medallions with NO face value commemorating American artists:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americ...s_medallions

To this day, these medallions are extremely obscure and, despite their low mintages, are almost never seen nor heard of. Why? Because they are not COINS, but medals... and so they are left out of the major coin catalogs. Apparently adding a face value worked, because once AGEs were seen as a "COIN series", they have now become a cornerstone of American numismatics. Mexico, though, sells its Libertads (and before that, its "balance-weight" silver rounds) without a face value.

The face value can be anything - but if it ever exceeds the price of silver, then you would be able to hear the bewildered bank tellers' calls to their managers nationwide as hordes of bullion stackers attempt to cash in their piles for dirty fiat. As a result, it is kept l-o-w... the Canadian SML's $5 face value is about as high as it gets.

MSD, let me tell you something. None of the governments have the ratio correct on their bullion coins. Some put $1 on the silver, some put $5 on the silver. Some have a 50:1 ratio, others have a 10:1. If there were a real ratio that was verifiable then all governments would acknowledge that and all monies would be equal to each other. Right there that tells me that nobody knows anything and they're just cashing in on a product that people want.

The truth is, try to spend these today. Try to get someone to take 50 ASEs for 1 AGE. Try it. People believed that this was an elite tax loophole, but it's been plugged up.

The only bullion coin that I find to be legit is the Mexican Libertad, simply for the fact that it doesn't have a legal tender amount engraved in the dies. It doesn't pretend to have worth based on what it says. It tells you right on the coin what it is: 1 onza plata pura, LEY.999 and that's all you really need to know. The coat of arms on the reverse is the standard in Mexico and that's what gives it the trust and purity you need. The sterling onza comes close (good for trade between silversmiths), but nothing beats .999+.

So what is the real ratio? You'd have to be omniscient to know this. Anyone saying that they know is trying to fool you and that's how people arrive at these insane ballooned numbers like $125 silver. One pundit will tell you it's a traditional ratio of 16:1. Someone else will tell you it's 12:1, and some historian who lives in a book will tell you it's more like 10:1. But today it is 62:1? Gold is not as rare as people want you to believe, but I accept that it's expensive so that people don't waste it.

So in conclusion, all countries have different ratios on their bullion coins and no one knows anything. It's all about money if you hadn't noticed by now. It would help you MSD if you went through old threads on this topic. A lot of us have seen what you're starting to discover so take it from us.

10:1 is the ratio used in ancient times, like Babylon, Lydia. It's the oldest and most outdated of ratios.

We're currently mining about 23,000 tons of silver per year, and about 2,700 tons of gold. So the global mining ratio is currently about 8.5 to 1. Of course, this can fluctuate quite considerably from year to year and is not independent of the metal prices - if the price of gold goes up, previously unviable gold deposits suddenly become viable and the production rate rises as a result. The current high gold production rates are probably a legacy of the price spike a couple of years ago.

As you can see, the mining ratio is not directly correlated with the price ratio. Mining is only one part of the "supply" side of the supply and demand equations which determine price; other factors that affect supply are recycling (putting previously mined metal back onto the market) and spoilage (metal that is lost, dissolved or otherwise unrecoverable). Silver traditionally has had a much lower recycling rate and much higher spoilage rate than gold.

And the mining ratio has absolutely nothing to do with the face value ratio of bullion coins. Most governments feel they need to give coins a face value, otherwise they're not technically "coins" but just "medals". But for bullion coins, they definitely do not want to put a "realistic" face value on the coins. If the price of bullion collapses, they do not want to be forced to "buy back" precious metal at the old inflated price. So they put prices that are so ridiculously low that if the bullion price ever falls below the face value, everyone would have a lot more things to worry about. But the final face values on the bullion coins are somewhat arbitrary.