Odd Lots - Philip Diehl on the Booming Business of Gold Coins

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Gold prices have been booming and are near record highs. And seeing the line go up — especially during a period of so much uncertainty —  makes people want to buy more. That includes acquiring actual gold coins. But where do gold coins come from? Why do people want coins, as opposed to just bullion? And who is buying them? On this episode, we speak with Philip Diehl, the president of gold vendor US Money Reserve. Earlier in his career, he was the 35th director of the US Mint, where he was instrumental in such endeavors as the 50 States quarter project, the Sacagawea dollar coin, and also the language that allows for the creation of the trillion-dollar platinum coin. We talk all about the business and supply chain of coinage, and who's buying these coins today. Watch on YouTubeRead more: Gold Advances as Market Weighs Upcoming US-China Trade Talks Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox -- now delivered every weekday --  plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, you've actually benefited a little bit from this move up in gold lady, right? You're a bit of a bullion hoarder, right? I thought you were about to call me a gold bug. I know you're not a full-on gold bug. But you're like gold bug adjacent or silver bug adjacent.

or something like that. Let me just be clear. I have inherited my long gold position, I guess, and silver as well. So for some reason, every year for my birthday and for Christmas, my dad gives me either a gold coin or a silver coin from his personal collection. He got it in his mind that, like, I really enjoy coins, I guess. And now I kind of do. There is something satisfying about having physical coins and sitting there. And I don't stack. them on YouTube or anything. But I do like to check occasionally that they're still there. And I do get a little bit of satisfaction when I look at my little pile of gold and silver. I have to say, you know, the one thing I don't own any physical gold, I do like the idea of owning a bunch of silver

and stacking it on a table and doing a YouTube video about that. Everyone should go look at the silver stackers on YouTube. I would be scared. You know, you could like bury them somewhere like out in the wilderness of Connecticut. I would be scared to hold a lot of bullion on my person, and then I would be scared to hold them in a bank because if everything goes bad, is the bank even going to be open in a safe deposit box? So I like the idea in theory of having a lot of precious metal. Anyway, precious metal has been doing really well lately. It has. I was just looking at a chart of gold, so it hit another record high just at sort of mid-April. And then it came down quite a bit, and now it's up again. Like, we're almost back to that record. It's pretty extraordinary. Gold is,

is sort of living up to the hype because there's all this chaos and all everything in the markets and the economy and politics. Gold is up. So, hands off, yes. You know what I like about gold. Tell me. I like the advertisements that you see on TV. And the interesting thing to me is, like, obviously the companies that are doing those ads are pitching an investment, but so much of the investment pitch is sort of mixed up with cultural values. Totally. So for instance, I was watching one earlier in preparation for this episode. And they were talking about how when you're walking down inflation boulevard and global instability avenue, you really need the safety of a gold coin, which not only represents security via gold, but also the security of the United States of America.

Like you get all these cultural references wrapped up in coins. 100%. And every coin has its design and evokes all this stuff about heritage and everything. Anyway, I'm really excited because we actually do literally have the perfect guest because it touches on many things that we're interested in. It's someone who I've actually known for a while. I've talked to before. Someone who we're going to talk about coins, but we're not going to talk about, well,

So let's just... My most hated coin. Yeah, see, there's one coin that Tracy hates. So we are going to talk to Philip Deal. He is the president of the U.S. Money Reserve, which sells gold. He was also, I think, one of the great mint directors in U.S. history. He was the 35th director of the U.S. Mint, where he, among other things, had numerous accomplishments. He was instrumental in the Sacajawea dollar, a dollar coin that was very successful,

sold to collectors. He was behind the 50 state quarters project, which, if you remember the 90s, they made a quarter for each of the states. Turns out our producer, Dash, has all of the 50 state quarters, which I didn't know. And we're not going to talk about this. Although it may be relevant again with the debt ceiling come up. He was also the one that got the language in the law that, in theory, allows for the creation of a platinum coin of a high denomination, which could be used to circumvent the debt ceiling. We're not going to talk about the trillion dollar. coin on this episode. We are going to talk about gold coins. Philip Deal, thrilled to have you on to talk now. Appreciate you coming on odd lots. It's great to be on. I've looked forward to this.

I'm so excited. Tell us about where to start even. Just tell us what the U.S. Money Reserve is so people understand, you know, where you're coming from. What is the business of the U.S. Money Reserve? We're a retailer of gold, silver, and platinum coins to the U.S. market. We sell mostly U.S. government coins issued coins, but also coins of other nations. We are probably in the upper mid-level of the marketplace, and I'd say that we're different from our competitors because we market differently. I have a very different approach from what is typical in the industry. This is something that I've really focused on for the last several years. For example, all of those advertisements that really harp on the end of the world

and how gold is your go-to investment for really hard times, a lot of that is met. When you look at the record, gold has performed extraordinarily, well over the last 25 years in good times and bad times. And a great example of that is right now, of course, this has been a hard year for stocks. And stocks are down probably the last time I checked. Of course, this changes daily, but down about 7%. And gold is up 27% this year. But last year was a great year for stocks. And stocks were up 23%, but gold beat it at 28%. And when you look back over the last 10 years, by about a 10 year, gold has beat the S&P 500.

To this point, my mom asked me last year if she should invest in gold. And I hate it when family members ask you these kind of questions because I'm not in the business of providing investment advice. But I told her, you know, sure, why not? Just don't put all of your money in gold. And now, fast forward like eight months, she's mad at me for not recommending that she buy even more gold. She took apparently a conservative position and should have bought more. But maybe I'll start with my most, uh, my biggest question, which is, what makes a coin popular? Well, a number of factors go into it. One is the denomination, for obvious reasons, the bigger the better. Also, the metallic matters, gold, more popular than silver. And design also is hugely important. And this is something that we really played on with the Sacagawea, a golden dollar. It's important that a coin be distinguishable, that it not be confused with another coin.

The Susan B. Anthony had that reputation with confusion with a quarter. Also, the design was not a popular design. Susan B. Anthony was not attractive on that design. So one of the things we wanted to do when we introduced the new dollar coin was to find a topic that the topic itself would be hugely popular. And the book, Undaunted Courage had come out probably about a year before we launched that coin. And, of course, a part of that story was the story of Sacagawea and her role on leading the Lewis and Clark expedition across the Rocky Mountains. And that had really captured the imagination of Americans.

and especially the story of Secretary Uyah carrying her infant son, John Batiste, on her back through that entire journey. And we ended up having the design competition for a design that fit, that theme. And we ended up with a beautiful design done by a goodacre. And as a result, also we did a lot of market research. on what would be necessary to make this coin successful. And when we launched it through Walmart, they had people standing in lines around blocks all over the country. We had something like 150 million of them distributed within the first month.

And it was an enormous success. But one of the things that is always a challenge for a dollar coin in the United States is you've really got to withdraw the dollar bill when you introduce the dollar coin. And that's been the case all through the Western economies where the high-denomination or low-denomination bill has to be eliminated when this high-denomination coin comes in. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to fashion icons about the

news of the moment, but I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacois, wherever you get your podcasts. How do you actually measure the success of a coin? Because if I think about something like the Sacagawea dollar, you're talking about initially there was a lot of interest in it, but I think, like, production didn't last for very long, and there are some people out there who would say, actually, it wasn't that popular with investors or Americans over the longer term. Yes, really a circulating coin like the second jewelry golden dollar is

successful if it circulates, if Americans use it in commerce. And we saw, but one of the challenges you face is a planning of the pump. Unless you get a lot of coins in circulation immediately, then it doesn't really enter circulation. And one of the constraints that coins face is the change tray in a cash register. At least that was the case 25 years ago when we were launching the golden dollar. And there's not really a place for a new denomination coin, unless, less that is made by the commercial entity, like by taking a quarter rolls out of one of the bins. And so that was the first big challenge that we faced. And you would think that it would be relatively straightforward because the Federal Reserve is our customer,

the U.S. Mint's customer for circulating coinage. The U.S. Mint produces the coins. The Federal Reserve purchases them at a markup. Believe it or not, U.S. Men is a profit-making enterprise. And then they're distributed around the country and then banks purchased them from the Federal Reserve. But when we went to the Federal Reserve and part of our market research and talked to the banks, they still remembered sort of the disaster that the Susan B. Anthony launch had been 20 years, actually 40 years earlier. And they said, well, all you have to do is prove to us this this coin will be accepted by the American people,

and then we'll order it. Well, that was a catch-22 for us, because, of course, unless they ordered it, we couldn't make it work. Right. And so I ended up going to Walmart and asking if they'd be interested in of launching the coin in all Walmart and Sam's locations on the same day at the end of January 2000. And they caught the vision of what that would mean and was a huge success for them. And we produced over a billion second trillion coins in that first year and distributed them first through Walmart. We had a contract with them to provide 300 million.

sacajolias, and we had to go back to them after the first half had been delivered and say, we need to be let out of the second half of that because now the banks are calling, and they haven't ordered any, and they're really unhappy that customers are coming to them. They don't have the sacadjuia, and they're calling the secretary of the treasury and the head of the Federal Reserve and complaining. So we want to take care of them as fast as we can. So it was an enormous success, and not just because people collected it, but because they were also using it. But banks don't like coins.

They like pearls. They don't like coins because coins are more expensive for them to handle, to ship. And we expected that. There was a natural resistance to it. My term expired in early 2000. So Psychagoria lost a champion at the top of the mint at that time. And the momentum was lost over the next several years. Tracy, I could listen to like technical details.

Coin stories. Public. Yeah. And like, you know, the fact about change trays and the, you know, and how difficult that is. I could listen to that for a really long time. Also, what I appreciate about this story is the sort of. The entrepreneurialism involved of like having to go out to the Walmart and the Sams and stuff like that. It's like a product launch.

Yeah, which we don't normally associate with anything in the government for the most part, except, you know, the mint is unique. Also, of course, you're a policy entrepreneur, but we're not going to talk about that specific area of the trillion dollar coin. Okay, I'm on the U.S. Money Reserve website, and I see that you have a one right at today's prices, a one-ounce gold American Eagle type two coin for $3,8009. $3.71. A one-ounce South African gold Krugaran. Something very sexy about holding Krugaranh specifically. I've always thought that's $3,806.31. Same price for the Austrian gold Philharmonic coin.

Oh, I have one of those. Really? Yeah. And I have the Maria Teresa gold coins too. I probably shouldn't say this on a podcast. You have 100 of these coins. Just don't build the location at home. Yeah.

And then also some silver coins that depict battles. But I want to just ask a little bit about the sort of basic supply chain here of some of these coins. So these are official government coins that the U.S. Mint still produces and then sells them to some distributor at a markup. And then you sell it at a further markup. Is that basically the gist of how these coins come into existence? Yes, just like any other product. And you're exactly right that we had treated a number of new products as typical commercial. commercial product launches. And so just like any other product, the manufacturer has a markup,

the distributor has a markup, and then also the retailer has a markup. And that's true for all bullion coins that are produced by other nations as well. And it is a competitive market. In the U.S., you can purchase any number of bullion coins produced by other nations. And They market them in similar fashion and mark them up in a similar fashion. It's a very competitive market. So speaking of markups, one thing I've always struggled with when it comes to coins is how much of the value is derived from the actual precious metal content, whether it's gold or silver or platinum, versus how much of the value is derived from the collectability and the general design or availability of the coin? Okay, it's important here to distinguish two different kinds of coins, actually three different kinds. One is brilliant coins, precious metal coins that are sold at a slight premium above the spot price of gold when they are sold.

Then a second type is a collectible coin, like a numismatic coin. U.S. Mint produces annual sets, also precious metal commemorative coins, and then circulating coins. So the precious metal coins that are brilliant coins and collectible coins are priced and marketed in very different ways. Commemorative coins are produced to much finer quality. And the strike is there are almost one-offs. There are multiple strikes in order to get that fine design, raise the design, and get the polished finish of the. those coins. And because the production process is much more detailed, there are fewer coins produce, many fewer coins produced. They are priced differently. They're marketed differently.

They're sold directly by the United States meant. And those coins, a substantial portion of the cost is reflected in those additional costs. And so, you know, a very dependent. on which metal you're talking about, but maybe 10% of a price or so of a gold coin or a platinum coin is represented by those additional costs. Whereas for a bullion coin, as I was saying, those are highly competitive. They're produced in very large numbers. They're not produced as collectibles. Sometimes they are collected, but they're not produced for that reason. Would an American Eagle count as a bullion coin or a sort of finite collectible item? Because I know they issue them by year.

Yes, they do. There are two versions of it produced. The bullion coin is produced in very large quantities. By law, they're supposed to be produced to meet public demand. The law states, although sometimes the mint runs into a bottle of, next and cannot fully meet demand, and they are produced in a very rapid mass manufacturing processes. The Eagle is also produced in a collectible, and it's called the Proof Gold Eagle, and it is produced according to those very high standards I was describing earlier, and is

sold at a significant premium above the spot price of gold. I'm looking again at the website. And one of the other things you sell is a Pearl Harbor gold coin, which is identified as exclusive to the U.S. Money Reserve and features Queen Elizabeth the second on the obverse, Navy ships and Japanese fighter planes on the reverse. Can you talk a little bit? Is that a U.S. government coin? Because there is also private stamping, right? Like someone can, you know, someone can get gold and stamp whatever they want on it and sell it. Yes. Can you talk about that? Yeah, talk a little bit about that. Those aren't really coins. Okay. When they're produced, they have to be legal tender to be coins. Okay.

You know, you see it football games and coin toss. Well, those aren't coins. Those are medals. They're medallions because they're not legal tender. It's not a U.S. coin. We usually don't put foreign royalty on our coins. And this is Green Elizabeth in this case. These are coins by other nations that the US Mint does not do this.

It does not produce bespoke coins according to order, but other nations do. And it's not unique to U.S. money reserve. Other companies do this too, but we have been more aggressive in developing coins through other governments in limited quantities that are collectibles in precious metal and marketing those. Typically, we are celebrating an anniversary. A percentage of these coins, the sale price of these coins typically goes to a charitable purpose. We have been very supportive of the U.S. Navy Memorial. So that's one of the ones we've really stood behind.

One thing I wanted to ask is when you're designing a coin, so when you were at the U.S. Mint, and I'm not talking about precious metal coins here, but just your sort of standard coin, how much does profitability come into considerations for designing a coin? Because I know with the Trump administration talking about maybe getting rid of the penny, this seems to be even more of an issue than it used to be, although people have been debating the existence of the penny. or whether it should exist for decades now. But do you sit there and write on a napkin, it's going to cost me X to produce, and I'll be able to sell it to the Federal Reserve and the banks for Y amount? Yeah, it's a factor. No doubt about that. And to a certain degree, or to a great degree, the U.S. Mint doesn't have discretion in the specifications of the coin. They are laid out in great detail.

in the legislation that authorized the coin. The loan exception to that is the platinum bullion coin, in which Congress, I'd ask Congress for virtually total discretion on that coin, and they gave it to us, and the trillion dollar coin came as an unintended consequence of that. There's no escaping the trillion dollar coin. Well, you can't miss it. But, yes, all the details are in the legislation. But the mint does attempt to produce those coins in the most efficient fashion possible within those constraints. And the penny has blown away our capacity to make profitable for over 30 years. I was the first mint director 30 years ago to recommend elimination of the penny.

You can see how much influence I had. But it's long overdue to be eliminated. There was a problem back in the 70s, I believe, where the penny had negative seniorage. I can describe what seniorage is here in a minute, but it's basically profit. And so, and the coin was being, it was all copper at the time. The corn was being melted down because copper, the copper content was worth more than the penny was. And so the Congress step. then and change the composition of the penny.

And we have a similar situation now with a nickel where it's a money loser. The production of the nickel is a money loser, but it might be profitable if there were some changes or at least the amount of money that is lost producing each coin would be decreased. Now, one of the things that came out of the Sacagaria corn and the 50 state quarters program, And those two huge projects, very entrepreneurial projects, as you were alluding to, Joe, those were launched within about a year of each other. And that took the U.S. Mint's profits, and our profits, the U.S. Mint's profits,

go to the American taxpayer that go into the general fund of the Treasury. And we took profits from $700 million a year when I came into the Mint to $2.6 billion after five years. And I told my staff that they'd all be wealthy if we're a private enterprise, but we'd get paid by the coin. Let's talk a little bit about the business more of selling these collectible coins and bullion coins and so forth at gold coins to a retail customer base. I have a couple of questions. One is, is volume associated with price? Because you must see you know, when the line is going up in terms of the price of an ounce of gold, do you generally see a correlation in pick up, pickup in people wanting to buy gold coins?

Absolutely. It's been a tremendous 19 months since this rally, this bull market began. And over that period of time, we've seen prices go up $1,600 an ounce from 1,800 to 3,400. this morning. And it's just, it's been one record after another being set. So we see a tremendous increase in demand. I think most people in the industry do. What about the demographics? So obviously, you know, generally I speak, I think of the gold coin buyer who would buy from U.S. Money Reserve is probably someone, you know, like Tracy's dad's age. Specific. What do you see demographics? Do younger generations, does Gen Z or millennials, Do they care yet about holding collectible or bullion coins?

When I was director of the Mint, I was in my 40s, and I would describe our buyers as being white male and over 50, and there's nothing wrong with that. I aspire to be one someday. But we worry about that demographic, you know, was fading out over a decade or two. That's not the case today. Gold is hugely popular across a very wide spectrum.

And that's not surprising, given the amount of coverage, the news coverage gold has received over the last two years. And these record prices, especially when the stock market is falling, people are looking for safe havens. And gold is the ultimate safe haven. It's been around for 5,000 years. It's always had value. It's had value world.

wide. It's the universal safe haven. And what we're beginning to see in some of the market research is a skewing of interest to younger audiences. That includes millennials and Gen Z. And some of the research indicates that they have greater interest in gold than boomers do. That was really a surprise to me, but not too much of a surprise once I thought about it because those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s were less focused on money and protecting ourselves than what our kids are. And so that's extraordinarily smart and forward-looking for them to be thinking about their futures and thinking about the role goal would have.

Now, the issue comes up whether, you know, what percentage of a portfolio should be in gold? I tell people never put all of your money in gold. Don't put all your money into any asset. There needs to be diversification in any portfolio. And the right percentage depends on how old you are, your risk-averse, you know, how large your portfolio is. there's no one-size-fits-all recommendation. But one of the factors I do recommend people to consider is how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the state of the world, the state of your own finances, and considering the safe haven history of gold,

the more pessimistic you are, I do recommend a higher percentage of your portfolio in gold. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data to keep you informed. Yes, there are other products like this from a variety of news organizations. But they usually rerun their radio newscasts throughout the day.

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Spotify or anywhere you listen. Why should I buy a gold coin versus invest in a gold mining stock? Well, mining stocks have tended to underperform the price of gold itself. And there's a simple reason for this. And that is, it's getting harder to find and more expensive to mine gold. The clear signal of this is if you look back over world gold production over the last 10 or 15 years. It hit a peak about 10 years ago. And despite the fact that gold prices have skyrocketed since then, and the miners had tremendous incentives because of that to increase production,

they haven't been able to. And this is one of the forces that is driving gold prices upward today and one of the reasons why I'm confident it will continue to go up is that, you know, you talk about peak oil. I don't know that we've hit peak gold, but the miners have not really been able to take advantage of these higher prices by increasing production. And so the miners are weighted by those additional costs. And also, gold is now mined more often and politically. and economically unstable and corrupt countries. And that adds a risk premium and a cost to doing business that the miners have to bear. It's so crazy, Tracy, I'm looking at a chart of GDX, the Vanek gold mining ETF, charting against GLD, the gold ETF. The miners are just done terribly

relative to gold. It seems like a terrible business. Kind of like how Bitcoin mining companies don't do as well as Bitcoin. I want to talk about them. You also sell gold bars. And so Oh, right now, I could buy a one kilo gold bar on your website for $115,547. And 95 cents. I could also buy a 10-ounce gold bar for $37,27,27. Where does that gold come from? What is the supply chain for just, let's say, I don't have any collectible interests. I just want a very space-efficient way to store a lot of gold.

Where did those bars come from and how do they get to my mailbox? Well, I think we sourced them from several different sources. And again, it's a highly competitive market. Yeah. And so, you know, we price shop like anybody else does. Those bars are typically coming from major refiners. Some of them are in Switzerland. But we are not buying them directly from the refiners.

We're typically buying them from some wholesale distributor. Got it. I can't actually tell you who they are at this time. Sure. Not because it's a secret, but because I don't know. I imagine one of the downsides to owning physical gold is storage, right? And the idea that, all right, you're putting all your money into this physical thing, but the risk is someone comes and finds it and steals it and you lose it all.

How are people dealing with that storage risk? Well, you can own a lot of gold and hold it in a very small place. So, I mean, and most people will put it into a safe deposit box in their bank along with, you know, the jewelry and other things, important documents and the like. And you can own hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars in a very small space. So I think the storage issue is a bit of a canard and becoming even more so as gold prices. have gone from $1,000 an ounce to $3,400 an ounce. You know, it's funny, so I'm looking at the price of the gold bars. And it's true, like you could store right now $15,000 worth of U.S. dollar value, or roughly

that looks like a fairly small, that one kilo of gold. What's funny, so silver is just so much cheaper because, so a 10 ounce gold bar is 37,000. A hundred ounce silver bar is only 3,700. So you get something that's the same weight. No, you get something that's 10x the weight for one-tenth of the price. So for gold, the appeal is lots of dollar value in a small amount of physical space. For silver, it's almost the exact opposite where you can spend not that many dollars and have something that fills up your entire table.

Something to stack. Yeah, something to stack and show off on your YouTube channel. Yeah, that's right. That's right. When you open that box of $100,000 with silver. then you feel like you've really gotten something. But is there a difference in the type of person who accumulates silver coins and bars versus gold coins and bars? There's an important difference between those two product lines, gold and silver, and the market forces that move them.

We think of them as both being precious metal, both of them being used in currency, both of them having this long history. has a store value, but silver, a much larger proportion of silver is used in commercial applications and industrial applications than gold is. So there's this cyclical component to silver that is largely absent in gold. And so gold has been considered a pure form of hedging against bad times than silver has been because silver is influenced by this cyclical demand factor. When I became director of the men, I really was not familiar with precious metals or coinage. I hadn't collected coins. But one of my first jobs outside of going to the mint was going to one of the big annual coin shows. And when they announced that the director of the mint was present, people lined up, like a hundred

people lined up to get my autograph. I was just so shocked by that. And I like to talk to people. And especially I like to talk to my customers and I was new with the Mint. And we were going to be very customer focused. I was on a mission to demonstrate how government can meet the highest standards of business. And the Mint was very far from that when I came in. So I talked to customers. And I spent a lot of time with them. And, you know, they were, they loved American history. That's one thing that's very clear. They loved the art and the stories behind coins. And they were red, red blooded Americans. And they were like the people I grew up with in West Texas. And so, you know, they seem very level-headed to me. I would be curious to get your thoughts on this. So what was it

like actually writing the bill that allowed for the possibility of the trillion dollar coin. No, it was just, it was nothing. We had the very first entrepreneurial project that I took on was I wanted to launch the nation's first platinum bullion coin or platinum coin of any type. And I wanted to demonstrate that we could go after the Japanese market, besides North America, the Japanese market was the hot, the big hot market for platinum coins. And our tallings north of the border, who I love and continue to love, even though there's some tension in the relationship now, they own that market. And I wanted to demonstrate that we can go and take that market away from them because I had bigger fish to fry in the 50 state quarters and a new dollar

coin and I just knew I wanted to demonstrate that. So I wrote a bill and I asked for complete discretion so that I could go over there and talk to the senior probably in his 80s Japanese distributor and sit down with him and say, I'd like to talk to you about designing a coin that will be successful in Japan. And I knew that we would go to the motion. of him expressing your opinion, but it was just the honor of being asked to participate in that process that would make the difference. And sure enough, when we'd launch the coin within six or eight months, we own that market. Philip Deal, you know, I consider you a hero because I never really worry about the debt ceiling being breached because I know that ability to mint a trillion

coin could come up and that will save us in the end. Thank you so much for coming on odd lots. Really delight to chat with you. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. Tracy, by the way, for those that don't know, they can go back. I've written a ton about it. The trillion dollar coin.

Just look up trillion dollar coin debt ceiling. For new listeners who aren't familiar with all the lore, just search for it. We don't need to repeat it. But I could really, like, all the sort of technical aspects of like, what does it make for a coin to be successful. Like I said, I could just sort of listen to details on that for a long time and all the market research and they're like, oh, we thought it could be big in Japan. We thought we could like beat out the Canadian seller. To my mind, really interesting stuff. Japanese coin collectors are indirectly responsible for the trillion dollar platinum coin. Very interesting. You know what I was

reminded of? I read a book, I guess a few years ago about numismatics. And I think it was called When Money Talks. And I remember the author described coins as sort of physical memes. Yeah, totally. Memeplexes. And each coin contains like a set of ideas and a set of values that then gets transmitted. And I think that really came through in the conversation with Philip. Like it is not just about the precious metal content.

It is also about all these sort of social things that are embedded in that coin as well. Yeah. And I don't know like what it is, but like I really want a Krugerrand specifically. You know what I'm saying? Oh, wait. I have a question for you. Yeah. Okay.

If you were offered a Krugrand versus the same amount worth of a tungsten cube, what would you choose? Well, I have my, well, the same value. Oh, so I need a, I might just get a Krugrand. I don't know. I'm really tempted. I have my tungsten cube. I think I need to diverse. That's true.

You need the novelty value of a crew grand. I need a crew grand. I need a crew grand. I really think I do. Okay. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.

I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at The Stallwart. Follow our guest, Philip Deal. He's at Philip N Deal. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Kermann, Dashel Bennett, at Dashbot, at Kale Brooks.

For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com. We have all of our episodes and a daily newsletter. And you can chat about these topics 24-7 in our Discord.org.g.g. slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you like it when we talk about the allure of physical coins, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes, absolutely add free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. This is Tom Keene, inviting you to join us for the

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