Silver Collection Highlights - 1972 Universaro World Trade Unit

Collection Highlights - 1972 Universaro World Trade Unit

When I was digging through the old treasure chest to find my donations for the ongoing monster raffle to support the silver gold stackers community, and came across a few rounds that I hadn't seen for a while. I thought this one aside to snap a few pics and to dig up with little research I had and couldn't find it. This is my 1972 world trade unit. This seem to be a fairly common theme in the 70s and 80s where many different coins were minted as a new hope of a trade unit standard.

I was able to find a little bit of information about the history of this. According to Numista

These were privately issued by Inter-Mint of Colton, California as a World Trade Unit. Their mint reports over 2,000,000 pieces struck.

This was corroborated by similar information found on a new site that I found, agroundworld.com
The information here seems similar to the an older site that had good information on older mints and, and rounds that had some collectibility. This sides corroborated the mintage of around 2 million, and who they're potentially made bye. The interesting part is that it appears they were sold by several companies via advertisements. Like most older silver companies, there is a fair amount of unknown information, bankruptcies, liquidations, and multi-layered organizations. All in all it sounds like it this was the business idea of a husband and wife team to trademarked some names images pretaining to the design

• Weight: 31.103g
• Edge: Reeded
• Minted: 2,000,000,
• Value: 1 oz

Obverse

I'm honestly not sure which one is technically the obverse or the reverse. I'm going to say that the obverse is the globe that split into two hemispheres with the world trade symbol on it. I believe one of the sites indicated that they would call this the outburst. I think that this is a decent design although it is not one of my favorites from the time. There's some good detail and I like deleted edge just overall I feel like it's slightly lacking.

Reverse

The reverse of this coin as we're going to go with has the set of a scale with what appears to be a pile of money and precious metals and on the other side red and wheat over five different faces. I couldn't find any information of who those five faces would be or what they represent but a much bigger fan of this side of the design. To me it just represents equal trade and that call back of commodities with wheat and money. Not sure why there's such a strong connection with money and we put a lot of money has seemed to tie back to agriculture.

Overall I do like my 1972 world trade unit. I believe this is the only one that I've ever found and collected, and it is safe in the stack for now. It does seem that there's a fair number of these on the market from time to time with slightly varying designs from the 19 72 through 1975 date ranges. Let me know if you have any more information on the silver round.