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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;yakpoo, post: 855138, member: 18157&quot;]That&#039;s a very good question...and one I&#039;ve spent the past little while trying to understand myself. In my case, it was with the First Spouse mintages.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>As near as I can tell, it all comes down to the meaning of the word &quot;issue&quot;. The Mint can make as many coins as they want, but they&#039;re not officially considered a coin until they&#039;re &quot;issued&quot;. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>In the quarter example you give, 176,212,000 quarters were &quot;issued&quot;. The majority of these coins were &quot;issued&quot; to Federal Reserve banks. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Commercial banks would place orders with their associated Federal Reserve bank which, in turn, would fill these orders from &quot;stock on hand&quot;. That may be from coins minted that year or from coins left over from a previous year. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>A much smaller number of coins would be &quot;issued&quot; from the Mint directly to the public in the form of US Mint sets. The final mintage is a total of all coins &quot;issued&quot;.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>If at some later date, previously issued coins are destroyed by the Federal Reserve Banks (damaged, worn, obsolete, etc), those numbers might be recorded, but are rarely deducted from the number of coins &quot;issued&quot;...as reported by Numismatic publications.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>An exception to that rule can sometimes be found with early Commemorative coins. For instance, (according to Breen) the authorizing act of February 23, 1916 allowed for up to 100,000 of McKinley gold dollars to be issued. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>There were 20,000 (+26 assay) minted in Aug and Oct 1916 and another 10,000 (+14 assay) issued in Feb 1917. Of those coins, 10,023 were melted (all 1916 dated coins). I have no idea where the Red Book gets its mintage numbers of 1916: 15,000 and 1917: 5,000.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Some of you may have followed my exploits in trying to figure out how the US Mint is administering the First Spouse Gold coin program. A very obtuse reference in Title 31, 5112(o) suggests that the First Spouse coins are &quot;issued by the Secretary&quot; (I assume that means the Secretary of the Treasury). </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>If that&#039;s the case, the Mint would be precluded from issuing these coins through secondary channels (such as the Bullion Dealer Network) and can only sell them directly to the Public as prescribed under Title 31. In this case, the Mint&#039;s &quot;final sales numbers&quot; would exactly equal the &quot;final mintage of each design&quot;.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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