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The 1-ounce gold Krugerrands is 91.67% fine
gold, and weighs 1.0909 troy ounces. It is distributed from the South Africa Mint in
tubes of 10 and/or 15 coins per tube. Its diameter is 32.7 mm, thickness 2.83 mm.
Gold bullion coins got their start in 1967 when South Africa
introduced the Krugerrands. South Africa is the largest producer of gold in the world, and
the Krugerrands helped the country to market the vast stores of gold coming out of the deep
mines around Johannesburg.
The convenience of a legal tender gold bullion coin, exactly
one ounce of pure gold, guaranteed by a government Mint for weight and purity, made The Krugerrands
the predominant way for individuals to buy gold bullion in the 1970’s.
With the demise of gold as legal tender coins in the first half
of the 20th Century, the only gold struck came to be special presentation pieces and collectors
issues, not the old fashion gold-for-money’s–sake gold coins as had been produced
for thousands of years prior. Gold-for-gold’s-sake was pretty much bullion bars, a form
of gold whose ownership was restricted in the United States from 1933 to 1975. Gold coins came
to mean coins of numismatic or collectors value, coins which traded for prices far in excess
of their gold value.
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The South African Government changed that with the introduction
of the Krugerrands in 1967.
Here was a coin, with legal tender status, purposefully made
to trade just for its gold value and the small cost of manufacture and distribution. South
Africa foresaw that gold ownership would become increasingly popular among private individuals
as the U.S. dollar was no longer a fixed amount of gold.
With the weakening of the dollar, the monetary standard of the
world was changing, and gold would play a growing part in those changes.
The South African Krugerrands made gold ownership simple by providing
a one troy ounce unit of gold that was easy to buy and sell all over the world. Instead of
odd-weight bars of gold, the market for private gold owners now had the convenience of mass-produced
bullion coins.
Later, other countries followed suit and produced their own bullion
coins, but not before tens of millions of ounces of gold Krugerrands were sold all over the
world.
(Krugerrands are commonly misspelled
as Krugerands)
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