Right now, American silver eagle dollars are more popular than ever and while the spot price of silver has been fluctuating quite a bit the last several months, currently the price for silver is higher than ever.

Whenever the stock market goes bunko, you'll often hear financial analysts and news reporters talking about investors taking a "flight to safety". Mostly they are talking about US treasuries and other govt securities that are considered secure from default, but what happens during the mad rush is that the interest rates are pushed down significantly. For instance, TIPS are trading with virtually a zero interest rate at the moment.

But there are other places investors often consider a good place to put their cash when the stock market is significantly bearish and those are the precious metals -- particularly gold and silver. Ideally, precious metals represent a hedge against inflation as well.

There are a variety of ways in investing in either metals without taking delivery -- there are ETFs for both Silver (SLV) and Gold (GLD) and of course you could trade on the futures market if you know what you are doing, but there really is nothing quite as satisfying as taking physical delivery of precious metal in the form of coins and one of the favorites ways to invest in silver are the American Silver Eagle dollars produced by the US Mint.

Most American Silver Eagle coins are bullion silver coins which basically means that the US Mint will pump out as many coins as they like and they are usually bought for their silver value. But the Mint also release Proof American Silver Eagles as well, in lower mintages.

Also, the ASE, as it is commonly abbreviated, is popular among nuministic coin collectors as well, so if you're going to buy them I would look for at least Brilliant Uncirculated (BU) coins and try and protect them from scratches, etc by keeping them in air-tite coin containers. Since you are already paying a premium on the silver spot price to buy a coin (for the Silver Eagles, it can be as much as 20-30% over spot depending on availability), you want to make sure you do what you can to maintain that premium if you decide to resell. While the coins will always be valued at the spot price of silver, it is quite possible to get substantially more than that on some coins.