The drop in silver and gold bullion coin sales at the major mints continues in August

No sign of an upturn in bullion coin sales at the Perth and US mints yet again, with only gold sales at the Perth Mint showing an uncharacteristic rise. Sales of PM gold bullion are virtually unchanged from July, but up almost 60% on August 2016 to 23k ounces. The same can’t be said of the US Mints Eagle coin which is still bouncing along the bottom with August attaining another five-year low, the sixth month in succession that it has earned the dubious record. To give you an idea of how low sales are, Gold Eagles have ratched up 103,000 ounces in total over the last six months. That’s 15,000 less than just January and a staggering 70,000 ounces less than July 2015.

Silver Eagle sales continue their erratic performance with another trough after Julys half-hearted peak, with a drop back down to a half-decade low at barely a million ounces. For comparison, August 2015 saw five times that quantity sold. Perth Mint silver sales have hit a new 2017 low and failed to break the 400,000 oz barrier. The good news is that September will see a bounce back as the new annual bullion coin designs have been announced. How big that will be could prove particularly telling.

We’re still trying to clarify the Royal Canadian Mint numbers for bullion coins in Q2/2017 as they’ve changed the way they report to include other bullion forms, but they’ve reported a drop of around a half on last year on the overall figures and there’s no reason to believe that wouldn’t apply to the coin part of that. We’ll update our graphs page when we’ve recieved clarification. Don’t forget to click the blue button link to see the bullion sales graphs as they depict what’s happening with better clarity than a table of numbers.

COIN SALES (oz) COMPARED TO: YEAR TO DATE COMPARED TO:
AUG-2017 JULY-2017 AUG-2016 JAN-AUG 2017 JAN-AUG 2016
US GOLD EAGLE 9,500 -46% -84% 220,500 – 63%
US SILVER EAGLE 1,025,000 -56% -20% 15,578,000 -46%
US GOLD BUFFALO 3,000 -50% -67% 75,500 -43%
PERTH MINT GOLD 23,130 -2% +58% 226,457 -14%
PERTH MINT SILVER 392,091 -66% +4% 6,520,261 -25%