I was curious about the Mintage of the 2011 ASE , how many the Mint planned to produced, so I called the US Mint and asked. The Mint said that the 2011 ASE was being minted based "On Demand". :rollling: What seems even stranger is that the Mint is limiting orders to 100 per household, even without any limits of production. Why limit the orders if there is no limit on the quantity that the Mint will produce? Has the Mint ever sold the Collector Proof ASE based On Demand, just like the Bullion ASE? The US Mint never ceases to amaze me, and leave me saying HUH!
I heard the price was $59 a coin. If the silver price is mid thirties the mint is making a mark-up of about 80%. Seems to me the government is taxing money out of the people that are buying physical silver. Guess there is more than one way to balance the budget.
Minted on demand means there is no set mintage and they will mint a certain number of pieces on speculation then further coinage will be based on the number and rate at which orders come in. This is pretty much standard procedure to prevent the possibility of having a large stock of unsold coins on hand if orders for them don't come in. If say a maximum mintage of one million had been made and they went ahead and struck that but then only sold 600K they would have wasted the time effort and money striking the other 400K. And yes they have struck and sold them on demand before.
Thanks, I didn't know that. We should ship them all off to China to help reduce the money we owe them
